Angelina Jolie Biography

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Name: Angelina Jolie Voight

Born: June 4, 1975 in Los Angeles

Height: 5'7

Hair: naturally brown

Eyes: blue/green

Parents: Jon Voight (actor), Marcheline Bertrand (actress)

Siblings: One brother, James Haven (director)

Next to Liv Tyler, Angelina Jolie is the only actress of her generation who can thank her famous father for the lips that have become her trademark. Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975 to actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand; their second child, after the birth of a son, James Haven Voight, two years earlier.

Raised mostly by her mother after her parents divorced while she was still a baby, Jolie moved around a lot with her mother and brother. She also did a fair amount of traveling as a professional model, living in such places as London, New York, and Los Angeles before settling for a time in New York as a student at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and New York University, where she first started acting in theater productions.

The fledgling actress soon moved on to film with a small role in 1993's Cyborg 2, followed in 1995 by her turn as a computer hacker in the more widely seen Hackers. The film gave her her first taste of recognition, as well as an introduction to Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller, to whom she was married for a short time.

After appearing in a number of mediocre films, Jolie finally hit it big in 1997 with her Golden Globe-winning performance as George Wallace's wife in the highly acclaimed TV movie George Wallace. The role, coupled with her Emmy-nominated performance in the title role of HBO's Gia, provided Jolie with a new level of professional respect and recognition. She was soon appearing on talk shows and in magazines, answering questions about everything from her multiple tattoos to her famous father to her brief marriage.

She was also netting roles in high-profile projects: In 1998 Jolie headlined an ensemble cast that included Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Anthony Edwards, Gillian Anderson, Ryan Phillippe, and Madeline Stowe in Playing By Heart. The following year, she was part of another high-voltage cast in Mike Newell's Pushing Tin, co-starring alongside John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett.

Although the film was neither a critical nor a financial success, it did little to diminish the rapid ascent of the career of the actress, who was in hot demand for projects that would further elevate her already rising star. In 2000, Jolie's star received one of its greatest boosts to date when the actress won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a volatile mental patient in Girl, Interrupted. Later that year, her personal life also got a boost in the form of her April marriage to Billy Bob Thornton.

Onscreen, Jolie was hard to miss in 2000. She starred in a number of films, including the crime thriller Gone in Sixty Seconds, in which she co-starred as a car thief alongside Nicolas Cage, and Original Sin, a thriller that featured her as the bad-seed bride of a Cuban tycoon (Antonio Banderas). If she was hard to miss in 2000, Jolie was impossible to escape in 2001 with her turn as shapely video-game adventuress Lara Croft in the long anticipated film adaptation of the popular Tomb Raider video-game franchise.

Carrying on the tradition of video-game movies that are light on plot but heavy on the action, Tomb Raider (2001) and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life (2003) scored with summer audiences and quickly shot to number one at the box office despite disparaging reviews citing an incoherent story line, unlike Life or Something Like It, the 2002 romantic comedy-drama that critics and audiences alike would rather not have seen.

On July 18th, 2002, Jolie filed for divorce from Billy Bob Thornton, claiming that their priorities no longer meshed after having adopted a child. Though the famously quirky couple were no longer, Angelina's film schedule remained hectic.

The actress returned to familiar territory for her comeback screen vehicle, the sequel "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life" (2003), a lackluster follow-up to a lackluster first outing. Reflecting their off-screen internecine tensions, Voight, did not reprise his role in this second follow-up. “Cradle of Life” was followed by a turn in the too-righteous political/romantic drama "Beyond Borders" (2003). After this came a dangerous foray into Ashley Judd territory with a starring role in the routine thriller "Taking Lives" (2004), in which Jolie played an FBI profiler caught up in dangerous and erotic intrigue.

Signing up for another purely commercial vehicle, the actress adopted another rich accent as she winkingly played the eyepatch-sporting Captain Frankie Cook, the leader of an all-female amphibious attack squadron, in the retro action-adventure "Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow" (2004). Cast opposite Jude Law and fellow Oscar-winner, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jolie joined the CGI-laden action-adventure battling giant robots in an Art Deco, 1930s-era environment. Jolie then lent her voice to the finny femme fatale, Lola, in DreamWorks' CGI-animated underwater underworld opus "A Shark’s Tale" (2004). Finally, Jolie closed out the year with a bizarrely seductive turn as Alexander's mother, Olympias, who raises her son to believe in his impressive destiny, in Oliver Stone's epic historical bomb, "Alexander the Great.”

Jolie's profile as both a movie star and public figure rose to even more epic proportions when she co-starred with the equally lovely actor Brad Pitt in the Doug Liman-helmed action-fest "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (2005). In it, the actors played a bored married couple who are actually rival assassins, each hired to kill the other. Almost from the get-go, spurious rumors abounded of an on-set romance between Jolie and Pitt – innuendo that contributed to Pitt's subsequent split from his high-profile marriage to actress Jennifer Aniston.

Though both Pitt and Jolie initially refuted the rumors – the two later took a coyer stance after being photographed together numerous times post-Aniston separation. The intense media and public interest in their possible romance propelled “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” to huge box office receipts, thanks in large part to their palpable on-screen chemistry. Needless to say, the "are they or aren't they?" nature of the Jolie-Pitt coupling captivated star watchers and quickly became the most written-about celebrity story of 2005 – even prompting the coining of the term "Brangelina."

Taking a page from the playbook of the late Audrey Hepburn, Jolie began using her celebrity status to bring attention to such humanitarian causes as the plight of violence-torn nations. As their relationship gradually emerged in the public eye, Pitt began to accompany Jolie on her missions of mercy to third world nations and grow ever more attached to her son, Maddox. Away from the screen, Jolie expressed a dedication and commitment to increasing awareness and aid to counties devastated by internal and external conflicts, disease and third world conditions.

In 2001, after the actress made several trips to the war-torn nations of Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Pakistan, Jolie had been appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was during one of these trips that in 2005, she adopted an infant daughter from an Ethiopian orphanage whom she named Zahara. Later that year, surprising the world at large, Pitt petitioned to adopt the two children as his own. A year later, on May 27, 2006, Jolie and Pitt welcomed their biological firstborn child into the world – a daughter named Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt. Clearly serious about starting a family, in March 2007 – Jolie and Pitt made headlines once again by adopting a fourth child – a three-year-old boy from Vietnam whom they named Pax.

Returning to the big screen later that summer, Jolie next starred as Marianne Pearl, the wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, in the gripping drama “A Mighty Heart” (2007). Though Jolie’s casting initially sparked a furor of controversy among minority groups, as Marianne Pearl was of Afro-Cuban/Dutch ancestry, much of the complaints dissipated upon the film’s release. Hailed by many as quite possibly the boldest performance of her career, Jolie’s portrayal of Marianne Pearl was rooted in dignity and reflected a tragic truthfulness free of exploitative sentimentality. Unfortunately, the serious film was released during the summer box office season, rendering it lost amidst all the big-budget special effect movies.

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