I’m a bit late giving an opinion of the Brangelina bust-up, but I thought that the royal couple might make it together all the way to old age, especially because they went on having and adopting children together at such a rate that it would always take two of them to drive the bus. And they were both very talented, which can look like intelligence in the hot lights.

Now they will go on being talented, but not together. It has always taken confidence on the spectator’s part to find Brad Pitt gifted. He looks like a standard-issue Hollywood pool attendant with his head on upside down. But quite early in his career he proved that he could act. His dumb swagger is the thing you remember from Thelma & Louise, along with the car going over the cliff with two lovely women inside it in a gesture even less credible than the sculpted look of Brad’s lower stomach.

In that early era, Brad wasn’t beautiful (his head was on upside down), but he was vital. Angelina, of course, really was beautiful, but after Girl, Interrupted, there could be no doubt that she was also an actor of high intelligence, even though her tattoos were real, and therefore suggested that the woman giving the blazing performances might be a long way detached from reality.

Actually, apart from her briefly cherished Billy Bob blood phial, there has never been any evidence of outright madness, and in general she has handled her career path so smartly that you feel it would be good if she could take over Donald Trump’s role in whatever movie he thinks he is in. She might be slightly slower to nuke Moscow, and much more credible than him if required to jump from truck to truck.

On this last topic, I happen to be an expert, because I have watched Salt half a dozen times at least, and Angelina’s truck-jumping expertise is a subject known to me in detail, like Simone Biles’ climactic floor exercise, the forward airborne inside-out triple twist with smile.

As a slow-mo analysis of Angelina’s most daring truck-jump reveals, her real secret is to look even more beautiful when arriving on the roof of the second truck than she did when leaving the roof of the first one. It was her ability to pass through the makeup department while in mid-air that established her as the greatest stunt-person since Yakima Canutt, the man who got dragged for a mile under John Wayne’s stagecoach. Angelina could have done that in a ballgown while pretending to be Marie Antoinette.

I admire her, and Brad does, too, of course, but he might have got sick of being the less interesting one. They could still do a great Anna Karenina.