Angelina Jolie later recalled her time as a student at Beverly Hills High School (later Moreno High School), and her feeling of isolation among the children of some of the area's more affluent families. Angelina Jolie's mother survived on a more modest income, and Angelina Jolie often wore second-hand clothes. Angelina Jolie was teased by other students who also targeted her for her distinctive features, for being extremely thin, and for wearing glasses and braces. Angelina Jolie's self-esteem was further diminished when her initial attempts at modeling proved unsuccessful. Angelina Jolie started to cut herself; later commenting, "I collected knives and always had certain things around. For some reason, the ritual of having cut myself and feeling the pain, maybe feeling alive, feeling some kind of release, it was somehow therapeutic to me."
After her parents' separation in 1976, Angelina Jolie and her brother were raised by their mother, who abandoned her acting ambitions and moved with them to Palisades, New York. As a child, Angelina Jolie regularly saw movies with her mother and later explained that this had inspired her interest in acting; Angelina Jolie had not been influenced by her father. When Angelina Jolie was eleven years old, the family moved back to Los Angeles and Jolie decided she wanted to act and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she trained for two years and appeared in several stage productions.
