Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie, born Angelina Jolie Voight, is an American actress, filmmaker and humanitarian. The daughter of actor Jon Voight, Jolie began her acting career as a young child in the 1982 film Lookin’ to Get Out. She then landed a few other minor roles until 1995, when she played the lead in the film Hackers. She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted, cementing her as a prominent leading lady in Hollywood. She is also known for her role as Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, her role in Mr. & Mrs. Smith in 2005, her performance as the title character in Maleficent in 2014 and her role in the 2008 film Changeling, for which she was nominated for another Academy Award. Jolie is also a humanitarian and philanthropist, most notably serving as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Jolie has also attracted a lot of media attention over the years for her high-profile relationships, including her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton from 2000 to 2003 and her marriage to Brad Pitt from 2014 to 2019. She shares six children with Pitt.
Divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie currently lives with actor Brad Pitt, in a relationship that has attracted worldwide media attention. Jolie and Pitt have three adopted children, Maddox, Pax, and Zahara, as well as three biological children, Shiloh, Knox, and Vivienne.
Early life and family
Born in Los Angeles, California, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is the niece of Chip Taylor, sister of James Haven and the goddaughter of Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell. On her father’s side, Jolie is of Czechoslovak and German descent, and on her mother’s side she is French Canadian and is said to be part Iroquois. However, Voight has claimed Bertrand was “not seriously Iroquois”, and they merely said it to enhance his ex-wife’s exotic background.
After her parents’ separation in 1976, 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, Jolie regularly saw movies with her mother and later explained that this had inspired her interest in acting; her father had not influenced her. When she 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.
At the age of 14, she dropped out of her acting classes and dreamed of becoming a funeral director. During this period, she wore black clothing, dyed her hair purple and went out moshing with her live-in boyfriend. Two years later, after the relationship had ended, she rented an apartment above a garage a few blocks from her mother’s home. She returned to theatre studies and graduated from high school, though in recent times she has referred to this period with the observation, “I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos”.