Angelina Jolie

 

Born in Los Angeles, California, on June 4, 1975, Angelina Jolie starred in the HBO biopic Gia before earning an Academy Award for best supporting actress for Girl, Interrupted. Jolie has become one of Hollywood's top marquee names, having starred in movies like Wanted, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Salt and Changeling. She's also directed the film In the Land of Blood and Honey, and is coupled with actor Brad Pitt.

Early Life

Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, to actor Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand. She rose to stardom in the 1990s. She began acting at a young age, studying at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute while in her early teens. Jolie later attended New York University.

Breakthrough Role

In the 1990s, Angelina Jolie became a popular actress. She gave a star-making performance in the 1998 television film Gia based 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, Interrupted (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.

Recent Roles

In October 2008, Jolie appeared in the Clint Eastwood-directed thriller Changeling. Jolie played Christine Collins, a mother whose son reappears after his kidnapping. Collins is sure the returned boy is not the one to whom she gave birth, and her fight reveals a police conspiracy. In 2009, Jolie received an Oscar nomination for best actress for her role in the film.
The actress went on to earn the lead role in the action-packed Salt (2010), about a CIA agent, Evelyn Salt, who is on the run after being accused of being a Russian spy. That same year, she earned the featured part of Elise Clifton-Ward in The Tourist alongside Johnny Depp. She has since been cast in the title role of Maleficent, slated to be released in 2014, and is scheduled to reprise her role as Evelyn Salt in Salt 2.

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 following year, Jolie married Academy Award-winning actor Billy Bob Thornton. That union lasted until 2003. Jolie met her next romantic partner, actor Brad Pitt, during the making of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 2004.
In 2002, Angelina Jolie adopted a son from Cambodia and named him Maddox. Three years later,
she adopted a daughter, Zahara. In 2005, actor Brad Pitt filed paperwork to adopt both of Jolie's children. 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 3-year-old boy from a Vietnamese orphanage and named him 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—making them the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken.
After the joy of welcoming her third child, Shiloh, into the world came great sadness for Jolie. She experienced a great personal loss in early 2007, when her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian cancer at the age of 56 after fighting the disease for many years.
In May 2013, 37-year-old Jolie announced in a New York Times op-ed article titled "My Medical Choice" that she underwent a double mastectomy in an effort to prevent breast cancer in the future. The actress said she decided to undergo the surgery after learning that she carries a gene known as BRCA1, which increases the risk of both breast and ovarian cancer. "My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman," Jolie stated. "Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could." By late April 2013, Jolie added, she had completed several months of medical procedures, including a double mastectomy and reconstruction surgery, at the Pink Lotus Breast Center in California.