Brad Pitt, who dropped out of college a week before he was due to graduate (probably not with honors) to drive to LA and take a shot at acting, once had a job as a chauffer for strippers. He said if it wasn’t for that depressing job, he would not have met a stripper who got him to go to an acting class that inspired him to pursue it as a career.

He made the confession to a Newsweek journalist during a roundtable discussion that included other potential Oscar nominees Helen Mirren, Forest Witaker, Cate Blanchett, Penelope Cruz, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Q: It seems every actor, no matter how successful, thinks he’ll never work again. Do you feel that way, Brad?
BRAD PITT: Not really, no. [Laughter]

Q: You all had some surprising early jobs before you became actors. Forest was a classical tenor. Helen was a sort of carnival barker.
PITT: I had a job driving strippers around.

LEONARDO DICAPRIO: Really?

BLANCHETT: Just last month.

PITT: I love her. Yeah, my job was to drive them to bachelor parties and things. I’d pick them up, and at the gig I’d collect the money, play the bad Prince tapes and catch the girls’ clothes. It was not a wholesome atmosphere, and it got very depressing. After two months I went in to quit, and the guy said, “Listen, I’ve got this one last gig tonight.” So I did it, and this girl—I’d never met her before—was in an acting class taught by a man named Roy London [a famous acting coach]. I went and checked it out, and it really set me on the path to where I am now.

Q: A stripper changed the course of your career.
PITT: [Nods] Strippers changed my life.

Q; We’ll see that in the National Enquirer next week.
PITT: [Looks toward the ceiling] I just want one week off. Just one.

If Pitt wants a week off he should stop telling such great stories about his past. You know he was banging that stripper and he took the acting class to impress her, just like he learned to fly after he hooked up with Angie. Maybe if that stripper was into horseback riding instead he’d be living on a farm now.

Update: Pictures removed on request.

This was on the front page of Yahoo! this morning, and they have an ABC News online video discussing it, so I didn’t think of it spontaneously, but several A-listers have commercials running in Japan. They say that despite the fact that we can easily find these commercials thanks to the Internet, it shouldn’t really hurt their branding in the US.

I don’t know how current these are, but I think the ones with Cameron and Brad are new. Let me know.

Brad Pitt for Softbank. Hot!

Another one of Brad Pitt for Softbank

Cameron Diaz for Softbank:

Another Cameron for Softbank:

Ewan McGregor, OMG!

Another cute Ewan McGregor commercial:

America’s royal couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, made their first award ceremony appearance together at last night’s Golden Globe Awards. Pitt was nominated for best supporting actor for his role in Babel, but that Globe went to Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls.

Pitt’s film Babel took home the Globe for best motion picture drama, beating out The Departed, Bobby, Little Children, and The Queen. I really hope The Departed gets the best picture Oscar, because that film was incredible.

Here are pictures of Brad and Angelina last night, courtesy of Simply Brad. Women’s Wear Daily reported yesterday that Angelina was not happy with her gown selections from St. John. Angelina is contractually obligated to wear clothing from St. John on the red carpet due to a lucrative deal as spokesperson for the clothing maker. You can see why she wasn’t pleased. It’s a pretty gown, but it’s just not stunning.

St. John’s customers are generally older and more conservative, making people question their choice of somewhat controversial Angelina to represent the line.

In some of these candids Angelina looks annoyed to me, but she seems to warm up and smile a bit in others. I really wish she would gain some weight as she’s setting an unhealthy standard for women by looking like a stick.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made their second red carpet appearance together at the LA premiere of the new documentary “God Grew Tired,” a film about Somalian immigrants put out by Brad’s Plan B Productions.

Also at the premiere were Nicole Kidman, who narrates the film, Catherine Keener, who co-produces, and Ed Norton.

God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of four young men who leave war-torn Somalia to start a new life in America. They hiked barefoot across the desert for five years against incredible odds and finally made it to a UN refugee camp in Kenya, where they were chosen to emigrate to the U.S. The documentary tells the poignant sometimes funny story of how they adjusted to their new life. Nicole Kidman narrates.

It is winning rave reviews and received the Grand Jury prize and Audience Review prize at this year’s Sundance Festival. I know I would love to see it. It is in limited release from what I could tell.

You can learn more about the film on the God Grew Tired of Us website.

Here’s the trailer:

Also, I wanted to point out that Angelina has a tell-tale bulging vein on her forehead, which I once read in a women’s magazine is the way you can tell that someone used Botox. I got too caught up in doing the research for the film to really focus on dissecting her every recent interview comment like I normally do.

There’s also a pretty funny picture I found at Hello! of Angelina talking to a stern-looking Kidman.

The rest of the pictures are high quality, found at SimplyBrad.

British newspaper The Guardian has a cautionary piece for Brad Pitt, saying that his career isn’t as great as it once was and that he can’t measure up to Matt Damon’s rising star. Damon has a big hit with the Bourne series and is playing meaty roles lately like in the super-boring Good Shepherd. All Pitt put out last year was Babel, which The Guardian deems pretentious, and although he’s been working a lot lately 2007 doesn’t have many great movies in store for Pitt.

They say the only promising film that Pitt is making in 2007 is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which won’t come out until Christmas time. The Oceans movies are kind of dragging him down, and he’s not really standing out in any films.

They say he hasn’t made any standout films since 1999:

That was 1999, and the last time he seemed awake and having fun. Moreover, from the outset, audiences have fun to the degree that he’s having a good time. We like to see that cheeky grin. But what we got instead was a series of films where the smile was fake or absent: Snatch, The Mexican, Spy Game (with Robert Redford - the kiss of death), Ocean’s Eleven, Full Frontal, the flat-out disaster of playing Achilles in Troy (I don’t think Achilles ever smiles), Ocean’s Twelve and Mr & Mrs Smith.

The latter was a hit, because the public was interested to see him with Angelina Jolie, yet it was hard to avoid the feeling that she was a lot sexier and smarter than he was. As for the two Ocean films - where he plays sidekick Rusty Ryan - they may have seemed like three months out with the boys and a sure cheque, but they have done no one involved any good. George Clooney survives because of all the other things he does. The same goes for Matt Damon. But Brad Pitt is behaving as if they were real jobs of work.

He has plenty of work coming up, including a third Ocean film, The Assassination of Jesse James (which really seems to be a film about Ben Affleck playing Bob Ford), and yet another David Fincher project, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which comes from an F Scott Fitzgerald story about a guy who keeps getting younger (a nice hope). I’d say the Fincher picture can’t come too soon, but it’s not likely to appear until next Christmas. Time for Pitt to think very hard about that crew cut he’s adopted, to learn to smile again, to say goodbye to Ocean and to realise that Angelina Jolie is riding her own private tsunami which other people are not expected to survive.

I say when you’re a star like Pitt and make so much money, who cares? It’s not like he’s Ben Affleck and has to be super careful about the films he’s making. He already has a great career and although he hasn’t won an Oscar or anything he’s not likely to slip from the A list. Sure DiCaprio, Damon and Craig are now stars to watch out for, but Pitt will always set women’s hearts aflutter.

He looks a little bit weathered now although he could be just tired out from a gruelling schedule. He is shown at the Palm Springs film festival on Saturday, where the cast of Babel received an award. When asked if he would have more kids with Angelina, he gave their standard answer “Of course.” Pitt, Jolie and their family will be living in New Orleans for the next few months while Pitt is filming The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Pictures from SimplyBrad. Thanks to WeSmirch for linking this story.

Oceans 12 was kind of a mess plot-wise, but the dialogue was good and the actors are so great you forget that films are supposed to make more sense. I would watch Clooney, Pitt and Damon sit around talking about anything. Throw in cool music and some heist scenes and I’m there.

Oceans 13 is scheduled for release on June 8, 2007:

Star magazine is reporting the unsurprising news that Jennifer Aniston has no intention of sitting down with Angelina Jolie for a little heart to heart. Angelina mentioned in a recent interview that she would love to have a little chat with Aniston. She claimed that nothing happened between her and Brad while they were filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but her comments that Brad was married to his “best friend” must have seemed like a backhanded dig to Aniston, who is said to have tried to get over the onslaught of news about her ex and his gorgeous fertile partner by doing yoga and bawling.

Now Star points out that Angelina requested several meetings with Aniston before that were all turned down. They quote a psychologist who says that Angelina is just trying to get over her man-stealing guilt by extending a PR olive branch to Aniston.

They’re really just stating the obvious, and might not have any insider information:

Apparently Angelina’s comments were particularly infuriating because the Mr. & Mrs. Smith star had forgotten to mention that Jen had already rebuffed several previous attempts at reconciliation! “Jen says Angelina could have told Vogue that she had already made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with her,” says the source.

Angelina’s comments, including her claim that she and Brad Pitt, 43, were just “very, very good friends” during filming of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and only became lovers after he and Jen had separated, have put Aniston in a funk as the holidays approach, the source tells Star. “Angelina has opened up some old wounds with Jen, wounds she thought had healed,” the source tells Star. “It seems like revisionist history to her to paint this picture of how Angelina and Brad got together. Jen says a lot of it is plain bull!”

[Star magazine print edition, January 1, 2007]

The article goes on to say that Aniston is perplexed that Angelina is bringing up all this old shit. They quote a psychologist who says that “There is a manipulative aspect on Angelina’s part in requesting this sit-down. Angelina wants to alleviate her guilt. It’s better for Jen to move on than to forgive this person. A sit-down isn’t going to help Jen at all.”

Jen is said to be “in a fragile state” now that she’s alone for the holidays. There was speculation that she almost ran into her more recent ex Vince Vaughn at the Beverly Hills Hotel over Christmas, but only Courteney Cox and David Arquette were at the hotel at the same time as Vaughn. Aniston was nowhere to be found.

It does seem really rude of Angelina to request a sit down with Aniston. If my husband left me for someone else unexpectedly I’d steer clear of her too.

These old pictures of Brad and Jen in June 2000 show how much alike they once were. Thanks to SimplyBrad for these pics.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt visited Costa Rica this Christmas to bring awareness to the plight of Columbian refugees there. Jolie has been an ambassador for the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees and wants the world to know of the millions of Columbians that have been forced from their homes in the twenty years of conflict in the Central American nation.

Jolie arrived in Costa Rica today and was to visit a group of refugee children and families and to meet Costa Rican officials, UNHCR said in a statement.

There are about 11,500 refugees in the Central American country, most of whom fled Colombia because of the conflict there between leftist guerrillas, soldiers and paramilitary forces.

“The conflict in Colombia is the greatest humanitarian tragedy in the Western Hemisphere, but it receives very little international attention,” the Oscar-winning actress said after she arrived in San Jose.

“My Christmas message to Colombian refugees and to the millions of displaced people in Colombia is that the world has not totally forgotten them.”

An estimated three million Colombians have been forced from their homes by more than two decades of armed conflict, and most are internally displaced, essentially refugees in their own country.

Another 500,000 have fled to other countries in the region. Together, the press statement said, they make up the largest single population of concern to UNHCR anywhere in the world.

Jolie and Pitt visited small business set up by Columbian refugees in Costa Rica thanks to micro loans from the UN. Micro loans, in amounts of just hundred of dollars, can help people in impoverished nations set up small businesses and escape a life of poverty.

This year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer in the field of micro loans in his nation of Bangladesh. You can learn more about how micro loans help through The Grameen Foundation.

People talk a lot of crap about how Brad and Angelina are doing charity for publicity, but Angelina seems to geniunely care about the plight of the people she visits. I’ve personally learned quite a bit from doing the research about her recent charity work. She seems to have reined in her agressive security staff, and her image has improved as a result.

Here are pictures of Brad and Angelina in Costa Rica, as well as some small shots of her shopping at LA boutique Kitson in LA on 12/21. Pictures from SimplyBrad, The Age, and China Daily. (Note that the China Daily article has some quotes from Angelina Jolie saying her family will be celebrating four Christmases or some shit. The source is Britain’s Grazia magazine, which routinely makes up quotes from celebrities. It doesn’t sound like Angelina to me at all.)

The NY Times’ Caryn James has a thought-provoking article that’s rather relevant to the realm of celebrity gossip blogs. She looks back on the year of celebrity gawking, and says that negative publicity affects the stars’ careers, but that the verdict is out as to how much.

2006 brought celebrity watching to new depths of detail. We saw Britney’s c-section scar, learned about Angelina Jolie’s method of birth control, and speculated about Tom Cruise’s sexuality while fawning over pictures of his supposed baby. We vascillate between mocking celebrities for the human foibles and admiring them for being skinnier than us with better accessories.

While old Hollywood presented screen stars as brands and shielded them from bad press, modern Hollywood throws them to the wolves and paparazzi. It’s not as damning as it once was to get a DUI, to go to rehab, or to be perceived as a husband-stealer, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect public perception. We say our most admired stars are the ones with home lives that are beyond reproach:

This emphasis on off-screen fame almost brings celebrity full circle, back to the era when actors were brands; their larger-than-life personalities were as flimsy as cardboard and constructed for the public, but so huge that “Cary Grant” was bigger than any Cary Grant movie. The crucial difference, of course, is that the fierce control studios maintained over actors’ images — covering up arrests, arranging bogus dates — has given way to a media culture in which virtually nothing remains hidden, from Mr. Gibson’s arrest report to Britney Spears’s no-underpants crotch. As an old-fashioned emphasis on personality collides with today’s ever-changing onslaught of truth, gossip and damage control, the result is a moviegoing public that paradoxically idolizes and mocks its stars.

What this cult of personality means for movies is still in flux, as stars, publicists and filmgoers adjust to a new tug-of-war over image-making, but the conflict certainly intensified this year.

Stars searched for ways to fight back, not very effectively. Some were mischievous: George Clooney suggested thwarting the celebrity-sightings section of the Gawker Web site by flooding it with fake reports. (There are already so many ludicrous reports, who could tell the difference?)

Others took the battle (nearly) to court. Reese Witherspoon sued Star magazine for falsely stating she was pregnant and in return got its version of a retraction: another photo of her in a bikini and the explanation “She’s not pregnant — it’s bloat!” At least we know she’s not pregnant. (She has reportedly settled the suit.)

And Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s Vanity Fair photo spread introducing their baby daughter, Suri (shot by the also-famous Annie Leibovitz), followed by their hugely hyped, celebrity-jammed wedding in Italy — what was that about if not image shaping? They allowed only their own photographers at the wedding, which made the hype more orchestrated, not less real. Their control added a veneer of desiring privacy, a sham the public didn’t buy…

There was more dismal news for image-shaping celebs recently, from the annual Gallup Poll measuring movie stars’ appeal. Asked which star’s films they would make a special effort to see, the respondents gave Tom Hanks the top spot, no surprise. He has always been an actor in the old-fashioned mold, sticking close to good-guy roles that mirror his clean-cut image.

Asked whose films they would avoid, those polled gave it to Mr. Cruise in a landslide, 34 percent. Coming in a distant second was Ms. Jolie at 18 percent. Being perceived as a wacko or as a home wrecker are obviously not the best P.R. choices.

It’s unclear how much the human failings of celebrities affect the box office. When people say that they’ll avoid Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie’s movies, all these details about their lives do seem to hurt their careers, but at least they’re staying in the public eye.

The posts about Angelina always have heated discussions, and some people dislike her so much that they use different nicknames to say the same thing over and over again as if several people have the same point about her. Rationally-minded commentors note that she’s considered the poster girl for husband-stealers and is an easy target for scorned women. While some may hate her, she attracts so much constant attention that the impact on the box office may be slight.

I hope that Britney’s career is going to suffer for all her partying and poon-baring, though. She’s a clear cut case of a celebrity who has made her bed and hasn’t changed the sheets in a long time.

Everyone is going to roast me for this but I think Brad and Angelina are actually good parents.

Maybe it’s holiday goodwill, or too many holiday cocktails but I am changing my white trash view Brad and Angelina’s parenting. Call me a sucker but I’m starting to think they actually be for real. Or at least, as real it can be for Hollywood.

I saw a story in Life & Style about a recent holiday shopping trip for the family. As their movie star peers shower their offspring with expensive gadgets, the Jolie-Pitts (or Pitt-Jolies?) purchased bunch of craft and art stuff:

On Dec. 8, the couple visited one of their favorite NYC stores, Lee’s Art Shop, on 57th Street, with Maddox, 5, and Zahara, nearly 2.

The store closed its fourth floor, otherwise known as Toy World, while the power couple and their tykes decided what to take home, an eyewitness tells Life & Style.

“They were really interested in the creative kits and projects and the things they could do together with the children,” says the eyewitness. “Angelina got down on her hands and knees to examine things with her kids. You can tell that she’s a wonderful mother. They were looking at activities that could expand the kids’ minds and things they could do as a family.”