Dame Angelina Jolie is a true lady and the Princess Diana of our time 

Dame Angelina Jolie is a true lady and the Princess Diana of our time

Fiona Phillips is proud of the picture she has with Angelina Jolie and even prouder of the actress\' achievements

I’m not one for doing selfies with celebs, but as a leaving gift, a lovely colleague of mine once presented me with a framed picture of Angelina Jolie and I, taken as we sat side by side chatting following an interview.

Being captured for posterity sitting beside someone so beautiful is a bit of a salutary experience. Although, thankfully, it was one of my better days, so it could have been worse.

I’ve interviewed Angelina a number of times and am always impressed by her dignity, tinged with warmth. She is a woman

who knows fame is nothing at all; that being a humanitarian is everything.

I remember first meeting her in Venice, where we were both ­backstage at a film premiere held in the awe-inspiring St Mark’s Square. She was still single then. I was over-dressed. She was in jeans and a simple top, carrying her first adopted son Maddox on her hip.

She moves in a sort of noiseless way, never wearing her celebrity mantle, unless it’s called for. Being a human being who has suffered, she shares an empathy with those who are suffering terribly.

She doesn’t court fame or attention, she uses it; it’s why, despite sharing a compassion for the oppressed, sick and dumped

upon, she’s more Diana, than Diana ever was. And without the surrounding hysteria.

Bravely speaking out about her preventative double mastectomy was so that other women would be armed with the knowledge of how to best deal with a genetic ­disposition toward breast cancer. It was also for her six children, she told Woman’s Hour on Wednesday, because having suffered the agony of losing her mother to the disease, the thought of telling them that

“I had cancer because I didn’t have the surgery” was frightening to her.

She’s been in London this week, hosting the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict. Her visceral connection with women who’ve had the horrors of savage wars taken out on them, is evident when she struggles to hold back tears as she hugs and comforts when she walks among those who’ve been brutally raped too many times to count – some mothers brutalised by boys young enough to be their sons. There is no respect. No compassion.

Angelina knows that ­religion – a bastion of male ­domination – is often the spur and the excuse for degrading and abusing women, for preventing them from being educated, for using them as a vehicle for violent sexual ­satisfaction.

She has drawn the world’s ­attention toward a crime that is unthinkable. She has made people talk about an act that

Angelina Jolie is a ­ Hollywood star , and now an honorary Dame. But she is also much bigger than that. I’m very proud of that picture.

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