Super Star Angelina Jolie

After the joy of welcoming her third child to the world came great sadness for Jolie. She experienced a great personal loss in the beginning of 2007 - her mother died of cancer after fighting the disease for many years.

Another great dramatic role in Girl, Interrrupted (1999) brought Jolie her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has continued to take on a variety of interesting roles, such as an adventurer in the Lara Croft films, a FBI profiler in Taking Lives(2004), an assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), and a neglected, troubled socialite wife in The Good Shepherd (2006).

In 2005, Jolie received the Global Humanitarian Action Award from the United Nations Association of the USA for her activism on behalf of refugee rights. She continues to travel the world to drawing attention to global issues.

After the joy of welcoming her third child to the world came great sadness for Jolie. She experienced a great personal loss in the beginning of 2007 - her mother died of cancer after fighting the disease for many years.

Angelina Jolie Voight was born in Los Angeles, California. Her father Jon Voight was an established Hollywood actor, who had earned worldwide fame for his performances in 'Midnight Cowboy', 'Deliverance' and 'Coming Home' - the latter winning him an Oscar.
Angelina’s mother was the part-Iroquois, part-French actress and model Marcheline Bertrand, who now, incidentally, works as Angelina’s manager. Angelina’s parents split up before she was two-years-old, and her mother moved back to the East Coast with Angelina and her brother James, where they lived in the Palisades, in the state of New York.

Despite her parents’ divorce, Angelina remembers her childhood as being a happy one. She was a huge 'Star Trek' fan, and showed her unusual tastes even at an early age, by having a crush on Mr Spock! Her taste in pets was highly original too, and she collected snakes and lizards. Her favourite snake was called Harry Dean Stanton, and her favourite lizard was called Vladimir.

At school, she joined a gang called the Kissy Girls, who hunted boys down and kissed them until they begged for mercy - until the school called a halt and the gang broke up! Money was tight whilst Angelina was growing up, but Marcheline made a point of taking her children to the movies as often as possible. Angelina claims that these family movie outings were what first inspired her to dream of becoming an actress.

When Angelina was 11, the family moved back to Los Angeles. Angelina decided to get serious about her dream of becoming an actress and enrolled for acting lessons at the prestigious drama academy, the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. But she didn’t enjoy her years at Beverly Hills High School, where she was constantly teased for wearing glasses and braces and for being so skinny. She also tried to get work as a model, but was turned down for being too short, too thin and too scarred. 

The teasing and rejection she experienced during her early teenage years had a disastrous effect on her sense of self-esteem, and at the age of 14, she dropped out of high school. She dyed her hair purple, moved in with her punk rocker boyfriend, adopted a Gothic dress code of black, black and more black - but more seriously, began to self-harm and cut herself. She even once asked her boyfriend to draw a blade along her jaw line - and still has a faint scar to mark the occasion.

At the age of 16, Angelina split up with her punk rocker boyfriend, and decided to revive her childhood dreams of becoming an actress. She moved into an apartment opposite her mother, and secured her first on-stage role, as a German S&M dominatrix! For the first time ever, she also began to make the peace with her father.

 She realised that when it came to acting, he had a great deal to teach her. With her braces and glasses gone, she even succeeded in landing work as a model, and even appeared in the video for Meat Loaf’s 'Rock’n’Roll Dreams Come Through'. She also appeared in promo videos for Lenny Kravitz and the Rolling Stones.

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• Born: June 4, 1975 (age 37), Los Angeles
• Height: 5' 8" (1.73 m)
• Net worth: US$ 30 million (2011)
• Children: Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Zahara Jolie-Pitt,Maddox Jolie-Pitt, More
• Spouse: Billy Bob Thornton (m. 2000–2003),Jonny Lee Miller (m. 1996–1999)

Breakthrough Role

In the 1990s, Angelina Jolie became a popular actress. She gave a star-making performance in the 1998 television film Giabased on the short, tragic life of model Gia Marie Carangi, which won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.

Another great dramatic role in Girl, Interrrupted (1999) brought Jolie her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has continued to take on a variety of interesting roles, such as an adventurer in the Lara Croft films, a FBI profiler in Taking Lives(2004), an assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), and a neglected, troubled socialite wife in The Good Shepherd (2006).

In 2007, Jolie gave a brilliant performance as Mariane Pearl, the pregnant widow of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, in A Mighty Heart. The film was based on Mariane Pearl's account of her husband's abduction and murder.


Humanitarian Efforts

A devoted humanitarian, Angelina Jolie was made a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency in 2001. She has made headlines for her work to obtain aid for refugees in Cambodia, Darfur and Jordan, to name just a few.

In 2005, Jolie received the Global Humanitarian Action Award from the United Nations Association of the USA for her activism on behalf of refugee rights. She continues to travel the world to drawing attention to global issues.

Personal Life

Famous for her off-screen romances, Angelina Jolie has been married twice. She married Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller in 1995. The couple divorced in 1999. The next year Jolie married Academy Award-winning actor Billy Bob Thornton. That union lasted until 2003.

In 2002, Angelina Jolie adopted a son from Cambodia and named him Maddox. Three years later, she adopted a daughter, Zahara, and later in 2005, actor Brad Pitt filed paperwork to adopt both of Jolie’s children.

Jolie and Pitt met during the making of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 2004. The couple’s first biological daughter, Shiloh, was born in the African country of Namibia in 2006. Jolie, Pitt, and their children had traveled there to avoid the media frenzy that seemed to follow them wherever they went.

In March 2007, Angelina Jolie added a new member to her family. She adopted a three-year-old boy from a Vietnamese orphanage. Her son is named Pax Thien.
Jolie gave birth to twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, on July 12, 2008, in a seaside hospital in southern France. The rights for the first images of the twins were sold to People and Hello!magazines for $14 million. The photos are the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken.
In October of 2008, Jolie appeared in the Clint Eastwood-directed thriller, The Changeling. Jolie played Christine Collins, a mother whose son reappears after his kidnapping. Collins is sure the returned boy is not the one to which she gave birth, and her fight reveals a police conspiracy. In 2009, Jolie received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for the role.