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Angelina Jolie Biography
Angelina Jolie was born on June 4, 1975 as Angelina Jolie Voight in Los Angeles, California. She is the daughter of actors Jon Voight (Czechoslovakian and German descent) and the late Marcheline Bertrand (French Canadian and part "Iroquois"). 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; she had not been influenced by her father. She has received three Golden Globe Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and an Academy Award for her acting talent.
When she was 11, 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. Jolie began working as a fashion model at 14. She was signed with Finesse Model Management and modeled in both the United States and Europe. At that time she also appeared in numerous music videos, including those of Meat Loaf ("Rock & Roll Dreams Come Through"), Antonello Venditti ("Alta Marea") and Lenny Kravitz ("Stand by My Woman"). At the age of 16 Jolie returned to theatre, and played her first role as a German dominatrix. She began to learn from her father, as she noticed his method of observing people to become like them.
After appearing as a child alongside her father in the 1982 film Lookin' to Get Out, Jolie's acting career began in earnest a decade later with the low budget production Cyborg 2 (1993) and she played her first leading role in a major film in Hackers (1995). She appeared in the critically acclaimed biographical films George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998), and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Girl, Interrupted (1999). She achieved international fame as a result of her portrayal of videogame heroine Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). In playing as Lara Croft, Jolie was required to master a British accent and undergo extensive martial arts training. She was generally praised for her physical performance, and since then has established herself as one of the best known and highest paid actresses in Hollywood. She had her biggest commercial success with the action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) with Brad Pitt.
Divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller (co-star in Hackers) and Billy Bob Thornton (co-star in Pushing Tin), 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, and a biological child, Shiloh. Jolie has promoted humanitarian causes throughout the world, and is noted for her work with refugees through UNHCR. She first became personally aware of worldwide humanitarian crises while filming Tomb Raider in poverty-stricken and widely mined Cambodia. According to Jolie, "I discovered things about what's happening in the world... It was really eye opening for me." Deeply affected by these experiences, she eventually turned to UNHCR for more information on international trouble spots. In February 2001, Jolie went on her first field visit, an 18-day mission to Sierra Leone and Tanzania; she later expressed her shock at what she had witnessed. She insisted on covering all costs related to her missions and shared the same rudimentary working and living conditions as UNHCR field staff on all of her visits. Impressed by her interest and devotion in the subject, UNHCR named her a Goodwill Ambassador on August 27, 2001 at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, despite her warning that her controversial public image might shed a negative light on the U.N.
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