Angelina Jolie says she stopped singing after an ex criticized her voice: 'I just assumed I couldn't really sing'

Angelina Jolie has rediscovered her voice.

The Girl, Interrupted star and First They Killed My Father director has returned to the silver screen in grand fashion with Maria, a biopic of the opera singer Maria Callas by Pablo Larraín (Spencer, Jackie). Naturally, Jolie had to sing in the film, but as she recently told The Hollywood Reporter, that posed just one problem: "I don't sing."

"I had somebody in my life who was not kind to me about singing," Jolie said. "It was a relationship I was in. And so I just assumed I couldn’t really sing. I’d been to theater school, so it was weird that it even had an effect on me. I just kind of adapted to this person’s opinion. So it took me getting past a lot of things to start singing."

Maria, which premiered on Aug. 29 at the Venice International Film Festival, culminates in a dramatic performance at the famous La Scala theater in Milan. As Jolie explained, the shooting process "grew and grew and grew until we were at La Scala. La Scala was the one everything was building toward. That was going to require the whole crew, the entire audience. It was so beyond my comfort zone that I was giddy. There was nothing else to do except to jump, to just fully jump."

But the process of reclaiming her voice wasn't easy. "It took many months of singing classes," she explained. "Months of just getting the singing down and then the Italian classes and then the voice and doing all these things like her. You try to be precise." Jolie said that singing opera, which requires using "your full body as loud as you could possibly sing" is "scary," because it's "rarely asked of us in life to be all that we can be or feel all that we feel."

Larrain told Vanity Fair that Maria is about "someone who, after dedicating her life to the audiences around the world that would listen to her, decides to find her own voice, her own identity, and finally do something just for herself.”

"I’m sure there’s a lot that will be read into it of our overlaps as women," Jolie told THR, saying "I’m not sure how comfortable we both are with being public." But Maria picks up on the legendary diva in the final days of her life, facing a public which has turned against her. Jolie has faced intense public scrutiny throughout her headline-making career, but has recently endured a particularly harrowing ordeal in her pursuit of a divorce from estranged husband Brad Pitt.

Those proceedings are now in their eighth year and have included disturbing evidence of Pitt's abuse and a protracted legal battle over a jointly owned winery.

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While Jolie and Pitt's daughter Shiloh recently dropped her father's last name, citing "painful experiences," Jolie remains close to her children.

Jolie told THR she had sons Maddox and Pax on set with her while filming Maria, which "really meant a lot" during the "heavy times." She explained, "usually when I’m expressing that much pain, it’s not in front of my children. You really try to hide from your children how much pain and sadness you carry. And so for them to be with you when you’re expressing it at such a level, I think it was the first time they ever heard me cry like that."

Jolie can be seen (and heard) alongside costars Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Valeria Golino in Maria on Netflix later this year.