Voight vs Jolie: Is Hollywood's most famous family feud near an end?

Relationships between fathers and daughters have often been known to blow hot and cold. But that between the actress Angelina Jolie and her famous dad, Midnight Cowboy star Jon Voight, has been seen more downs than ups all of which have been played out in the glare of publicity.

Although he gave her an insight into the acting craft and she was his young companion to the Academy Awards even making her film debut alongside him in 1982, she always insisted she made it in her own right on her own terms – something she demonstrated by dropping Voight from her name.

Her father’s affair while in a relationship with her mother contributed to the chilliness between the two but the breaking point came in 2001 when an emotional Voight told Access Hollywood that his daughter had "serious mental problems" and pleaded with her to seek help.

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But now Voight, 70, has revealed relations are on the mend and that the most famous family feud in showbusiness, if not quite at an end, could be healing. “We’re in touch, but not regularly,” Voight told Us Weekly magazine. “We love each other and that’s the most important thing.”

Father and daughter met “face to face” in February and – with the support of Jolie’s boyfriend Brad Pitt - have been talking ever since, a family friend told the magazine. “Angie made the initial contact,” said the friend. “Brad Pitt has been supportive - a key factor in her reaching out.”

There have been attempted reconciliations before. The two appeared together in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001 but following the television interview and the name change there was no dialogue. "My father and I don't speak. I don't hold any anger toward him. I don't believe that somebody's family becomes their blood. Because my son's adopted, and families are earned," Jolie said at the time.

Although she has admitted learning from her father’s observational techniques and the shared passion for acting, her father’s behaviour has always proved problematic. When probed in an interview on her own private life she said: "To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn't be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife."

Jolie and Pitt have three adopted children and three children of their own. Voight was one of the biggest stars of the 1970s following his appearance in the 1969 Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy in which he played the hustler Joe Buck.