Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, into a family already rooted in the movie business. Her father, Jon Voight, had recently won acclaim for his performances in Midnight Cowboy and would soon take the Academy Award for Best Actor for Coming Home. Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, was an actress of French Canadian descent who largely set aside her own career to raise Angelina and her older brother, James Haven ^[1].

Her parents separated in 1976, when Jolie was still an infant, and the divorce left lasting strain between father and daughter. Bertrand moved the children first to Palisades, New York, then back to Los Angeles, where Jolie attended Beverly Hills High School among classmates far wealthier than her own household. She has described feeling like an outsider during those years, drawn to secondhand clothes and to acting classes rather than the social life of her school ^[2].

The pull of performance came early. As a child she appeared briefly alongside her father in the 1982 comedy Lookin' to Get Out, and by her early teens she was studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. She later trained at New York University's film school and worked as a fashion model in Los Angeles, London, and New York, appearing in music videos for artists including Meat Loaf and the Rolling Stones before film roles arrived ^[1].

Jolie's screen career began in earnest in the early 1990s with low-budget productions, most visibly the 1993 science fiction film Cyborg 2. Her first substantial lead came in Hackers (1995), a story of teenage computer intruders that failed at the box office but built a cult following and introduced her to her first husband, the British actor Jonny Lee Miller ^[2].

Television, not cinema, delivered her breakthrough. Her portrayal of the model Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS-related illness at 26, in the 1998 HBO film Gia won Jolie a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, following a Golden Globe the previous year for the miniseries George Wallace ^[3]. Critics singled out the rawness of her performance, and casting directors began to see her as more than a striking face from modeling portfolios.

The decisive turn came in 1999. Playing Lisa Rowe, a magnetic and destructive psychiatric patient in Girl, Interrupted, Jolie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, along with another Golden Globe and SAG Award ^[3]. She was 24. Within two years she converted that prestige into global box office power as the video game adventurer Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), a hit that established her as one of the few women then able to open a big-budget action film ^[1].

Any honest account of Angelina Jolie achievements has to run on two parallel tracks: cinema and humanitarian work. On screen, she built one of the most commercially reliable careers of her generation. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), the animated Kung Fu Panda series, Wanted (2008), Salt (2010), and Disney's Maleficent (2014) and its 2019 sequel each earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, and for several years she ranked as Hollywood's highest paid actress according to industry surveys ^[4]. Her dramatic work continued alongside the blockbusters: her performance as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart (2007) and as a mother confronting police corruption in Clint Eastwood's Changeling (2008) brought further award nominations, the latter earning her a second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress ^[3].

Behind the camera she pursued heavier material. Her directing debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), dramatized the Bosnian War and the use of sexual violence as a weapon. Unbroken (2014) told the survival story of Olympic runner and prisoner of war Louis Zamperini, and First They Killed My Father (2017), made in the Khmer language with a Cambodian cast, adapted Loung Ung's memoir of the Khmer Rouge years and earned Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for best foreign language film ^[5].

Her humanitarian record is just as concrete. After witnessing conditions in Cambodia while filming Tomb Raider, she approached the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, becoming a Goodwill Ambassador in 2001 and a Special Envoy in 2012, a post she held until stepping back in 2022 after more than 60 field missions to places including Sierra Leone, Darfur, Iraq, and the Syrian border regions ^[6]. With the British foreign secretary William Hague she co-founded the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, launched in 2012, and co-chaired its 2014 global summit in London. In 2013 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and in 2014 Queen Elizabeth II appointed her an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for services to British foreign policy ^[4].

Jolie's family life has drawn as much public attention as her films, though the essential facts are straightforward. She married Jonny Lee Miller in 1996; they divorced in 1999. A second marriage, to the actor Billy Bob Thornton, lasted from 2000 to 2003. During that marriage she adopted her first child, Maddox, from a Cambodian orphanage in 2002, the beginning of a family that would eventually include six children ^[2].

Her relationship with Brad Pitt, whom she met while filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith, became one of the most followed celebrity partnerships of the 2000s. The couple adopted Zahara from Ethiopia in 2005 and Pax from Vietnam in 2007, and had three biological children: Shiloh, born in Namibia in 2006, and twins Knox and Vivienne, born in France in 2008. Jolie and Pitt married in France in 2014 and separated in 2016; she filed for divorce that September, and the legal process over custody and shared property continued for years afterward ^[4].

In 2013 Jolie made a decision with unusual public consequence. After genetic testing showed she carried a mutation of the BRCA1 gene that sharply raised her risk of breast and ovarian cancer, diseases that had killed her mother in 2007 at age 56, she underwent a preventive double mastectomy and announced it in a New York Times opinion piece titled My Medical Choice. Two years later she wrote again after having her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. Researchers later documented a measurable rise in genetic testing referrals that press coverage called the Angelina effect ^[7]. Cambodia granted her citizenship in 2005 in recognition of her conservation work there, making her a dual national of the United States and Cambodia ^[6].

Since the mid-2010s Jolie has balanced selective acting work with writing, business, and continued advocacy. She returned to blockbuster scale with Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) and joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thena in Eternals (2021). She also directed the drama By the Sea (2015), in which she starred opposite Pitt ^[1].

Her 2024 performance as the opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín's Maria brought some of the strongest reviews of her career, including nominations for the Golden Globe and other major awards, and marked a deliberate shift toward character-driven prestige work ^[8]. Around the same period she opened Atelier Jolie, a fashion venture based in New York built around collaboration with refugee and immigrant tailors, occupying the Manhattan building where Jean-Michel Basquiat once worked ^[8].

She has also become a published author and columnist. With the human rights lawyer Geraldine Van Bueren she wrote Know Your Rights and Claim Them (2021), a guide to children's rights aimed at young readers, and she has served as a contributing editor for Time magazine on displacement and conflict ^[6]. Her production of Broadway's The Outsiders won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Musical, adding an unexpected theater credit to her résumé ^[8].

The clearest measure of Jolie's standing is how much of her influence operates outside cinema. Public health researchers still cite her 2013 disclosure as a case study in how a single celebrity statement can change medical behavior at population scale ^[7]. Diplomats and aid agencies credit her two decades with UNHCR with keeping refugee crises in front of Western audiences during years when attention drifted, and the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative helped push wartime rape onto the agenda of the UN Security Council and the G8 ^[6].

Within film, her career traced a path few actresses of her era managed: from Oscar-winning character work to action stardom to directing international co-productions in Bosnian and Khmer. First They Killed My Father, selected as Cambodia's entry for the Academy Awards, remains one of the highest profile films ever made about the Khmer Rouge period ^[5].

For readers researching an Angelina Jolie biography, the durable Angelina Jolie facts are these: an Academy Award and three Golden Globes as an actress, an honorary damehood and the Hersholt Award for humanitarian service, dual American and Cambodian citizenship, six children, and a body of directed work rooted in historical atrocity and survival. She remains active in all of these arenas, which means the record is still being written ^[4].