A heartwarming scene unfolded on Thursday night at Palazzo del Cinema ahead of the world premiere of Pablo Larraín’s Maria during the Venice Film Festival. Angelina Jolie, who toplines the biopic, newly acquired by Netflix, as the famed opera star Maria Callas, paused during her red carpet duties to bend down and greet a bed-ridden fan.
They shared a brief conversation while throngs of adoring fans and festival photographers looked on at their encounter.
According to sources, Italian writer Pasqualino Esposito has become a Venice Film Festival regular over the past few years and has secured a place on the red carpet to greet Hollywood stars. He suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic disorder also known as “brittle bone disease.”
Esposito with Jolie, who bent down in her Tamara Ralph gown and faux fur stole to have an intimate conversation.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
It is typically diagnosed at birth and its severity differs across at least eight different types of the disorder. Per John Hopkins, osteogenesis imperfecta is an inherited condition and can cause soft bones that fracture easily, bones that are not fully formed, and other severe deformities like muscle weakness, chest and spine abnormalities, skin that bruises easily and hearing loss.
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Esposito and his father after his starry encounter. “She’s a person with a very big heart,” Esposito told THR with the help of a translator about his time with Jolie. “She’s fantastic.”
The Oscar-winning actress is well-known and beloved for her long-standing humanitarian and human rights efforts across a range of causes, including conservation, education, and women’s rights. She has served as a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
After the encounter with Esposito and spending a generous chunk of time with fans along the barricades, Jolie slipped inside the Sala Grande for the official world premiere of the biopic Maria. Based on true accounts, and written by Steven Knight, the film tells the tumultuous and tragic story of the life of one of the world’s greatest opera singers during her final days in 1970s Paris. When the credits hit the screen at the end, the audience erupted into an eight-minute standing ovation that eventually moved Jolie to tears.
Asked during a festival press conference about the parts of Callas she most related to, Jolie said it was “the part of her that’s extremely soft and doesn’t have room in the world to be as soft as she truly was — as emotionally open as she truly was. I share her vulnerability more than anything.”