Angelina Jolie

ANGELINA JOLIE

Angelina Jolie (who arrived as Angelina Jolie Voight) was born on June 4th, 1975 -- she is an Academy Award-winning American film actress.  She has also, in recent years, become the Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency.  She is widely considered to be one of the world’s most beautiful women in the world, and her life has been the subject of great tabloid fodder.

Born in Los Angeles, California to actor Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand, Angelina has one brother, James Haven, who would also become an actor.  Angelina’s parents separated not long after she was born, and Marcheline, abandoning her acting ambitions, moved her and her brother to Palisades, New York.  A few years later, they moved back to L.A.  At age 11, Angelina, quite interested in acting (which she swears was the influence of her mother and not her father), followed in her mother’s footsteps and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.  While attending Beverly Hills High School, Angelina began to feel like an outsider -- she was teased, tormented and was considered an antisocial outcast.  After an unsuccessful attempt at modeling, Angelina’s self-esteem fell further.  It was around this time that she began a dubious period of cutting herself.  She later stated, "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."  Dropping her theater studies at age 14, and adopting a fashion sense not unlike Morticia Addams, Angelina moved in and out of her mother’s home a few times.  Of this period, she says, "I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos"

In the early 1990s, Angelina began to find work as a model and a video siren.  She appeared in Meat Loaf’s Rock & Roll Dreams Come Through, Lenny Kravitz’s Stand By My Woman, and The Lemonheads It’s About Time.  In 1993, she got her first lead role in the loooooow-budget Cyborg 2.  After this, came roles in Hackers (where she met her first husband, Jonny Lee MIller), Love Is All There Is, Mojave Moon, Foxfire, George Wallace, and Playing God.  She also appeared in the Rolling Stones music video, Anybody Seen My Baby?

Angelina received her first critical raves for the 1998 HBO biopic, Gia, where she played supermodel Gia Carangi.  As the film chronicled the rise and tragic fall of the late model, and pulled no punches doing so, Angelina received her second Golden Globe (the first was for a role in George Wallace).  Next came roles in Hell’s Kitchen, Playing By Heart, Pushing Tin (where she met her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton -- she and Miller divorced in 1999), and The Bone Collector.

For her role as Lisa, a troubled (to put it mildly) mental patient in Girl, Interrupted, Angelina took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.  This was followed by a turn in the Nicolas Cage vehicle, Gone in Sixty Seconds.  The film was terrible, but another breakout part was just around the corner.

In 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Angelina played the titular (heh, heh) character form the bestselling video game.  The film was not received well by critics, but audiences seemed to like it.  After making Original Sin with Antonio Banderas, she also starred in the sequel, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Angelina began to seek more serious roles in films like Beyond Borders and Taking Lives before briefly returning to escapist fare in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

After divorcing Billy Bob Thornton in 2003, Angelina starred alongside Brad Pitt in Doug Liman’s action comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith, about a married couple who are (unbeknownst to each other) both assassins.  When they both receive hit orders on the other, much comedy ensues.  Brad Pitt was, of course, married to Jennifer Aniston at the time, and it was greatly conjectured that he and his costar were becoming verrrrrry close while on the set.  Both Brad and Angelina swear to this day that their onset relationship was chaste, but do admit to falling in love with each other during this time.  Within months, Brad would divorce Jen, and return to Angelina.  The movie earned nearly half a billion dollars world wide.

Angelina went on to star in the Robert DeNiro directed The Good Shepherd, A Mighty Heart, Beowulf, Kung Fu Panda, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, and the film version of the graphic novel Wanted.

Becoming aware of third world humanitarian causes while filming the first Tomb Raider movie in Cambodia, Angelina would increasingly turn her time and money to assisting those is such dire need.  After expressing shock during visits to Sierra Leone and Tanzania, she returned to Cambodia and met with Afghan refugees in Pakistan -- she donated $1 million in response to an international UNHCR emergency appeal.  She also covered all her own costs and shared the same living conditions as the field staff.  In 2001, at UNNCR headquarters in Geneva, Angelina was named Goodwill Ambassador.  Since that time, her travels and travails under this title have been far and wide.

Angelina has adopted three children, a Cambodian boy, Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt (also a fixture among tabloid photos), an Ethiopian girl, Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt, and a Vietnamese boy, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt.  She and boyfriend Brad Pitt also have three children born between them: a daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, and twins, a boy, Knox Léon Jolie-Pitt, and a girl, Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt.  While the rights for the first images of the babes were jointly sold to celebzines People and Hello! for $14 million—the most expensive celebrity pictures in history—all the proceeds were donated to charity.

Up next: Salt, and Atlas Shrugged.