Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie is an American actress, filmmaker, and humanitarian. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Tony Award and three Golden Globe Awards. Films in which she has appeared have grossed over $6.9 billion worldwide. She has been named Hollywood's highest-paid actress multiple times.
Jolie made her screen debut as a child alongside her father, Jon Voight, in Lookin' to Get Out. Her film career began in earnest a decade later with the low-budget production Cyborg 2, followed by her first leading role in Hackers. After starring in the television films George Wallace and Gia, Jolie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1999 drama Girl, Interrupted. Her portrayal of the titular heroine in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider established her as a leading lady. Jolie's success continued with roles in the action films Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Wanted, and Salt, as well as in the fantasy films Maleficent and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film Eternals. Jolie is widely credited with cementing the "female action hero" archetype in blockbuster cinema.
Jolie had voice roles in the animated films Shark Tale and the Kung Fu Panda franchise, and gained praise for her dramatic performances in A Mighty Heart, Changeling, which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and Maria. As a filmmaker, Jolie directed and wrote the war dramas In the Land of Blood and Honey, Unbroken, First They Killed My Father and Without Blood. She also produced the musical The Outsiders, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Jolie is known for her humanitarian efforts. The causes she promotes include conservation, education, and women's rights. She has been noted for her advocacy on behalf of refugees as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She has undertaken field missions to refugee camps and war zones worldwide. In addition to receiving a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award among other honors, Jolie was made an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. As a public figure, Jolie has been cited as one of the most powerful and influential people in the American entertainment industry. She has been cited as the world's most beautiful woman by various publications. Her personal life, including her relationships and health, has been the subject of widespread attention. Jolie is divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brad Pitt. She has six children with Pitt.
Early life and background
Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California, to actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is the sister of actor James Haven, and the niece of singer Chip Taylor and geologist and volcanologist Barry Voight. Her godparents are actors Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell. On her father's side, Jolie is of German and Slovak descent, while on her mother's side, she is of Dutch and French ancestry. She is a distant relative of former Dutch Finance Minister and Prime Minister Wim Kok. Jolie has claimed to have distant Indigenous ancestry through her French-Canadian mother. However, her father says Jolie is "not seriously Iroquois", saying it is something he and Bertrand made up to make Bertrand seem more "exotic".File:Jon Voight 1988.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Jolie's father, actor Jon Voight, attending the 60th Academy Awards in 1988
Following her parents' separation in 1976, she and her brother lived with their mother, who had abandoned her acting ambitions to focus on raising her children. Jolie's mother raised her as a Catholic but did not require her to go to church. As a child, she often watched films with her mother and it was this, rather than her father's successful career, that inspired her interest in acting, though she had a bit part in Voight's Lookin' to Get Out at age seven. When Jolie was six years old, Bertrand and her live-in partner, filmmaker Bill Day, moved the family to Palisades, New York; they returned to Los Angeles five years later. Jolie then 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.
Jolie first attended Beverly Hills High School, where she felt isolated among the children of some of the area's affluent families because her mother had a more modest income. She was teased by other students, who targeted her for being extremely thin and for wearing glasses and braces. Her early attempts at modeling, at her mother's insistence, proved unsuccessful. She transferred to Moreno High School, an alternative school, where she became a "punk outsider", wearing all-black clothing, going out moshing, and engaging in knife play with her live-in boyfriend. She dropped out of her acting classes and aspired to become a funeral director, taking at-home courses on embalming. At age 16, after the relationship had ended, Jolie graduated from high school and rented her own apartment before returning to theater studies, though in 2004 she referred to this period with the observation, "I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos."
As a teenager, Jolie found it difficult to emotionally connect with other people, and as a result she self-harmed, later commenting, "For some reason, the ritual of having cut myself and feeling the pain, maybe feeling alive, feeling some kind of release, it was somehow therapeutic to me." She also struggled with insomnia and an eating disorder and began using drugs; by age 20, she had used "just about every drug possible," particularly heroin. Jolie had episodes of depression and planned to commit suicide twice—at age 19 and again at 22, when she attempted to hire a hitman to kill her. When she was 24, she experienced a nervous breakdown and was admitted for 72 hours to UCLA Medical Center's psychiatric ward. Two years later, after adopting her first child, Jolie found stability, later stating, "I knew once I committed to Maddox, I would never be self-destructive again."
Jolie has had a lifelong dysfunctional relationship with her father, which started when Voight left the family when she was less than a year old. She has said that from then on their time together was sporadic and usually carried out in front of the press. They reconciled when they appeared together in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, but their relationship again deteriorated. Jolie petitioned the court to legally remove her surname, Voight, in favor of her middle name, which she had long used as a stage name; the name change was granted on September 12, 2002. Voight then went public with their estrangement during an appearance on Access Hollywood, in which he claimed Jolie had "serious mental problems." At that point, her mother and brother also broke off contact with him. Jolie and Voight did not speak for six-and-a-half years, eventually rebuilding their relationship in the wake of Bertrand's death from ovarian cancer on January 27, 2007, and they both went public with their reconciliation three years later.
Career
Early work (1991–1997)
Jolie committed to acting professionally at the age of 16, but initially found it difficult to pass auditions, often being told that her demeanor was "too dark." She appeared in five of her brother's student films, made while he attended the USC School of Cinema-Television, as well as in several music videos, such as those for Lenny Kravitz's "Stand by My Woman", Antonello Venditti's "Alta Marea", The Lemonheads's "It's About Time", and Meat Loaf's "Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through". In 1993, she also appeared on the cover of the Widespread Panic album Everyday. Jolie then learned from her father by noticing his method of observing people to become like them. Their relationship was less strained during this time, with Jolie realizing that they were both "drama queens".Jolie started her professional film career in 1993, when she played her first leading role in the direct-to-video science-fiction sequel Cyborg 2, as a near-human robot designed for corporate espionage and assassination. She was so disappointed with the film that she did not audition again for a year. Following a supporting role in the independent film Without Evidence, she starred in her first major studio film, Hackers. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that Jolie's character "stands out... because she scowls even more sourly than and is that rare female hacker who sits intently at her keyboard in a see-through top." Hackers failed to make a profit at the box office, but developed a cult following after its video release. The role in Hackers is considered Jolie's breakthrough.
After starring in the modern-day Romeo and Juliet adaptation Love Is All There Is, Jolie appeared in the road movie Mojave Moon. In Foxfire she played Legs, a drifter who unites four teenage girls against a teacher who has sexually harassed them. Jack Mathews of the Los Angeles Times wrote of her performance, "It took a lot of hogwash to develop this character, but Jolie, Jon Voight's knockout daughter, has the presence to overcome the stereotype. Though the story is narrated by Maddy, Legs is the subject and the catalyst."
In 1997, Jolie starred with David Duchovny in the thriller Playing God, set in the Los Angeles underworld. The film was not well received by critics; Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote that Jolie "finds a certain warmth in a kind of role that is usually hard and aggressive; she seems too nice to be girlfriend, and maybe she is." Her next work, as a frontierswoman in the CBS miniseries True Women, was even less successful; writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Robert Strauss dismissed her as "horrid, a fourth-rate Scarlett O'Hara" who relies on "gnashed teeth and overly pouted lips." Jolie also starred in the music video for the Rolling Stones's "Anybody Seen My Baby?" as a stripper who leaves mid-performance to wander New York City.