Angelina Jolie American Actress Known for Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Early life

Angelina Jolie was born Angelina Jolie Voight on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, the daughter of the actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Her parents separated the following year, and she and her brother grew up mainly with their mother. As a child she appeared briefly in her father's film Lookin' to Get Out (1982).

Back in California she trained for two years at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, then attended Beverly Hills High School and later Moreno High School, an alternative school. She began acting professionally at sixteen. In 2002 a court approved her petition to drop the surname Voight and use her middle name, Jolie, which she had long worked under.

Career

Her first leading film role was in the science-fiction sequel Cyborg 2 (1993). She followed it with Hackers (1995), her first major studio film, and then moved into television. She won Golden Globe Awards for the television films George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998), in which she played the model Gia Carangi. For Gia she also won her first Screen Actors Guild Award.

Girl, Interrupted (1999) brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Lisa Rowe, along with a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She became widely known as an action lead with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and its 2003 sequel. Other films from the early 2000s include Beyond Borders (2003), Taking Lives (2004), and Alexander (2004), in which she played Queen Olympias.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), opposite Brad Pitt, grossed $478.2 million worldwide. She played Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart (2007), voiced Grendel's mother in the motion-capture film Beowulf (2007), and starred in the action film Wanted (2008). In Clint Eastwood's Changeling (2008) she played Christine Collins and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. From 2008 she voiced Tigress in the Kung Fu Panda series, and she starred in Salt and The Tourist in 2010.

She made her feature directing debut with In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), a drama set in the Bosnian War that she also wrote. She directed Unbroken (2014), about the Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, and By the Sea (2015), in which she starred with Pitt. First They Killed My Father (2017), a Netflix production set during the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, was co-written with Loung Ung and cast Khmer-speaking actors. She also took the title role in Maleficent (2014), which earned $757.8 million worldwide, and returned in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019).

In 2021 she played Thena in the Marvel film Eternals. She wrote, directed and produced Without Blood (2024), based on a novel by Alessandro Baricco, and she was a producer of the Broadway musical The Outsiders (2024), which won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The same year she starred as the opera singer Maria Callas in Maria, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and brought her another Golden Globe nomination.

Recognition

Her film awards include the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Girl, Interrupted and three Golden Globe Awards. Changeling earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and a BAFTA nomination. In 2013 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. In 2014 she was named an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for her work on behalf of survivors of sexual violence in conflict and for her contributions to British foreign policy.

Public roles

After visiting war-affected regions while filming in Cambodia, Jolie contacted the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, and began making field visits. She was named a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador on August 27, 2001. In April 2012 she became the agency's Special Envoy, a post that carried authority to represent the High Commissioner at the diplomatic level. She went on more than forty field missions in her first decade with the agency and resigned from the post in December 2022, saying she would continue to advocate for refugees.

In 2012 she launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative with the British foreign secretary William Hague, and in 2014 she co-chaired a global summit on the issue in London.

Personal life

Jolie married the actor Jonny Lee Miller in 1996, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1999. She married Billy Bob Thornton in 2000, and they divorced in 2003. Her marriage to Brad Pitt began in 2014 and ended in 2019. She has six children: Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, Vivienne and Knox.