Angelina Jolie, Tori Spelling, Kristin Cavallari's strained relationship with parents: 'Dad was a narcissist'
Hollywood stars are opening up about their complicated relationships with their parents.
Stars like Angelina Jolie and Tori Spelling are two of many celebrities who have had public falling-outs with their parents. While some have been able to reconcile with their mother or father, others have decided to cut ties permanently.
Here's a look at a few stars who've spoken out about their fractured relationships with their parents.
Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie and her father, Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight, have always had a turbulent relationship. Jolie's mother, Marcheline Bertrand, and Voight divorced when Jolie was 5 years old, leaving Bertrand to raise Jolie and her brother, Jamie, on her own.
Jolie remained close with her mother, with Voight making sporadic appearances in her life. After a brief reconciliation while working together on "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," the two once again went their separate ways in 2002 when Voight told "Access Hollywood" that she needed help for her "mental problems." This especially angered Jolie as she felt it would interfere with the adoption of her son, Maddox.
"I don't want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father," she said at the time. "I will only say that, like every child, [brother] Jamie and I would have loved to have had a warm and loving relationship with our dad. After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child."
The two reconciled in 2010 for a few years and then again in 2017 after Jolie's divorce from Brad Pitt. She told the "Awards Chatter" podcast at the time that she and Voight "have gotten to know each other, through grandchildren," and although they still run into bumps in the road sometimes, "through art [they've] been able to talk," calling it "the common language."
In 2019, Voight praised Jolie for being "a very invested mom," telling US Weekly that she provides her kids "love every second of their day."
Tori Spelling had a great relationship with her father, Aaron Spelling, telling "Access Hollywood" in 2014 that she "was very much a daddy’s girl." Things changed when she divorced her first husband, Charlie Shanian, in 2006 after an affair with Dean McDermott, a move that her parents did not approve.
While she reconciled with her father right before his death in June 2006, it took longer to repair her relationship with her mother, Candy Spelling. Over the next few years, the two would attack each other through statements in the media, with Candy once saying Aaron's death was caused by Tori's decision not to speak with him.
"My daughter one day decided that she wasn’t speaking to my husband, myself and my son, and that’s how it’s continued for the last, oh gosh, four or five years," Candy told 94.7 WMAS-FM’s Kellogg Krew in 2009. "And it was sad. That’s what killed my husband, actually. He just didn’t want to live after that."
Fast-forward to 2022, their relationship has appeared to have gotten better, with Tori telling Jeff Lewis on his Sirius XM show at the time that while they have "had a good relationship … it's like next-level right now."
During a December 2023 episode of her podcast, "Let's Be Honest," Kristin Cavallari opened up to her guest, psychologist Dr. Sherrie Campbell, about her decision to cut her father, Dennis Cavallari, out of her life two years prior.
Campbell and Cavallari were discussing narcissim when the former "Laguna Beach" star said that her father's narcissism is the reason she felt compelled to cut him off, saying it "has honestly been the best thing I’ve ever done."
Cavallari explained not realizing her father was a narcissist until she was an adult, but she remembers not feeling very comfortable around him as a child, saying he would always put her down, only complimenting her when it benefited him.
"How I got my dad out of my life was something happened with my kids, and it crossed the line," Cavallari said. "And I was like, ‘You know what? I’m f---ing done.’ And he blamed me for it, like threw everything back in my face. I was always like, ‘I can take it.’ You know, I can take the abuse. I have my whole life. But it’s like, when you start now messing with my kids, I’m not doing it."
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Cole Sprouse has spoken out about his relationship with his mother, Melanie Wright. He and his twin brother, Dylan Sprouse, began working when they were a year old, and their parents were divorced a year later.
When the twins were 10 years old, their father took over full physical custody. However, prior to that, Wright had allegedly spent close to all the money the twins earned from their early acting jobs, according to People magazine. Cole told Alex Cooper on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast in March 2023 that his mother "was an incredibly wonderful and artistic woman" but was "the most irresponsible woman ever" when it came to finances.
"I think it was the consequence of some weird alchemy of addiction and mental instability, and it's probably the greatest wound in my life and also the greatest driving force for my continuing in this industry," he said. "She really believed that I could be the best and I think I still do it for her ... to kind of keep her dream alive."
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In a separate interview on the "Diary of a CEO" podcast in March 2023, Cole called his father "an incredible guy" who raised them after the court deemed his mother unfit. He said that looking back, he "see[s] a person that grapples with mental illness, drug abuse, but primarily narcissism."
"My mother was, still is, the tortured artist type. She struggled with, in many different ways, her place in the world," he explained. "I think she found a tremendous amount of self-identity through motherhood and tried to turn it into a profitable business at the same time, which for identical twin boys going into acting is [an] economic loophole. There are labor laws that can be incredibly profitable, so that’s what she did."