Angelina Jolie on the rocks
Angelina Jolie in pink
Angelina Jolie looking sexy
Angelina Jolie in a beaded dress
Angelina Jolie in Black and White
Angelina Jolie kneels on the ground
Angelina Jolie in black
Angelina Jolie in black
Angelina Jolie
Bio
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born
June 4, 1975 (age: 31)
Los Angeles, California
Occupation
Actress, fashion model,
UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador
Career milestones
Hackers (1995)
Gia (1998)
Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)
Angelina Jolie (born Angelina Jolie Voight on June 4, 1975) is an Academy Award-winning American actress, a former fashion model, and a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency. She is often cited by popular media as one of the world's most beautiful women and this same media also frequently reports on her tumultuous off-screen life. She has received three Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
Jolie started her acting career with the low budget production Cyborg 2 in 1993 and had her first leading role in a major film in 1995’s Hackers. She went on to appear in the critically acclaimed biopics George Wallace and Gia and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1999 drama Girl, Interrupted. Jolie achieved international fame for her portrait of videogame heroine Lara Croft in 2001 and since then established herself as one of the best known and highest paid actresses in Hollywood. She had her biggest commercial success with the 2005 action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Jolie has been married twice – to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton – and she currently lives with fellow actor Brad Pitt, a relationship that sparked a worldwide media frenzy. Jolie and Pitt have two adopted children, Maddox and Zahara, and a biological child, Shiloh. Since 2001 Jolie is well known for promoting humanitarian causes around the globe, most prominently for her work with refugees through UNHCR.
Early life and family
Born in Los Angeles, California, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is the niece of Chip Taylor, sister of James Haven and the god-daughter of Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell. People often assume that Jolie's mother is French, because of her name, but Jolie's grandparents were French-Canadian. She is of Czech and English descent on her father's side, and French-Canadian and Iroquois on her mother's side.
After her parents' divorce in 1976, one-year-old Jolie and her older brother James Haven were raised by their mother who had moved with them to Palisades, New York; one year later Voight won his Academy Award for Best Actor for Coming Home. Her mother gave up her dream of becoming an actress to raise Jolie and her older brother. As a child Jolie collected snakes and lizards, she had a crush on Mr. Spock and went to the movies regularly with her mother; Jolie later explained this is how she got interested in acting, not from her father. When she was 11 the family moved back to Los Angeles. Now 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. As a student at Beverly Hills High School (later Moreno High School), she was not alone in her cinematic ambitions, but felt like an outsider in the midst of good-looking, pampered children who teased her for her odd looks and being painfully skinny, for wearing braces, glasses and second-hand clothes, since unlike the other parents, her mother was not rich. Her confidence was further damaged when her initial attempts at modelling proved unsuccessful. Jolie grew increasingly unhappy, felt worthless and started to cut herself; something she speaks openly about today, e.g. during an appearance on CNN, "I collected knives and always had certain things around. 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." At 14, Jolie dropped out of her acting classes and dreamed of becoming a funeral director. She started a life of fast-living and active self-loathing, wore black, dyed her hair purple and went out moshing with her live-in boyfriend. Two years later, as the relationship had ended, she rented an apartment above a garage a few blocks from her mother's place. She went back to theatre and graduated high school, but even today Jolie likes to point out, "I am still at heart just a punk kid with tattoos".
Jolie has been long estranged from her father – in part because she blames his cheating on her mother for the break up of their family – though a reconciliation was attempted by his appearing with her in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. In July 2002 Jolie filed a request to legally change her name to "Angelina Jolie", dropping Voight as her last name; the name change was made official on September 12, 2002. In August of the same year Voight had claimed that his daughter has "serious emotional problems" on Access Hollywood. In the October 2004 issue of Premiere Magazine Jolie indicated that she was no longer interested in pursuing a relationship with her father, "My father and I don’t speak. I don’t hold any anger toward him. I don’t believe that somebody’s family becomes their blood. Because my son’s adopted, and families are earned." She stated that she did not want to publicize her reasons for not having a relationship with her father, but since she had just adopted her son Maddox, that she did not think it was healthy for her to be around him. Voight has not met his grandchildren.
Career
Early work, 1993–1997
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, working mainly in Los Angeles, New York and London. She also appeared in numerous music videos, including those of Meat Loaf ("Rock'n'Roll Dreams Come Through"), Antonello Venditti ("Benvenuti in Paradiso") and Lenny Kravitz ("Stand by My Woman"). At the age of 16 Jolie went back to theatre. Now committed to acting, her first role was a German dominatrix. She began to learn from her father, as she noticed how he would observe people to become like them. At that time she stopped fighting with him so much, realising that they were both "drama queens".
Jolie had appeared in five of her brother's student films, made while he attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts, but her movie career properly began in 1993, when she got her first leading role as Casella "Cash" Reese in the low budget film Cyborg 2, playing a near-human robot, designed to seduce her way into the headquarters of her creators' rivals and blow up. Following several undistinguished projects she starred as Kate "Acid Burn" Libby in her first Hollywood picture, the 1995 film Hackers where she met her first husband Jonny Lee Miller. The New York Times wrote, "Within this group, Kate (Angelina Jolie) stands out. That's because she scowls even more sourly than [her co-stars] and is that rare female hacker who sits intently at her keyboard in a see-through top. Despite her sullen posturing, which is all this role requires, Ms. Jolie has the sweetly cherubic looks of her father, Jon Voight." The movie failed to make a profit at the box-office, but has developed a cult following from its video release.
Now roles started coming fast for Jolie. She appeared as Gina Malacici in the 1996 comedy Love Is All There Is, a modern-day loose adaptation of Romeo and Juliet based among two rival Italian family restaurant owners in Bronx, New York. In the little known road movie Mojave Moon she was a youngster, named Eleanor Rigby, who falls for Danny Aiello, while he takes a shine to her mother, Anne Archer. Still in 1996 she played Margret "Legs" Sadovskyone, one of five teenage girls who form an unlikely bond in the film Foxfire after they beat up a teacher who has sexually harassed them. The Los Angeles Times wrote about Jolie's 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, a film portraying a famed LA surgeon who is stripped of his medical license and is lured deep into the criminal world where he meets Jolie’s character Claire. The movie wasn't received well by critics and Roger Ebert noted that "Angelina Jolie finds a certain warmth in a kind of role that is usually hard and aggressive; she seems too nice to be [a criminal's] girlfriend, and maybe she is." She then appeared in the TV movie True Women, a historical romantic drama set in the West, based on the book by Janice Woods Windle.
Breakthrough, 1997–2000
Jolie achieved wider recognition after being nominated for an Emmy and picking up a Golden Globe Award for her role as Cornelia Wallace in the 1997 biopic George Wallace. The film was highly praised by critics and, among others, received the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries/Motion Picture made for TV. She played the second wife of the segregationist Governor of Alabama who was shot and paralyzed while running for President. The film starred Gary Sinise and was directed by John Frankenheimer.
In 1998 Jolie starred in Gia, another biopic, this time of Gia Carangi, a bisexual supermodel from the 1970s. The film featured sex, drugs and fearsome emotional drama, including the destruction of Carangi's life and career by her drug habit and her gruesome death of AIDS. Vanessa Vance from Reel.com noted, "Angelina Jolie gained wide recognition for her role as the titular Gia, and it's easy to see why. Jolie is fierce in her portrayal – filling the part with nerve, charm, and desperation – and her role in this film is quite possibly the most beautiful train wreck ever filmed." For the second consecutive year, Jolie won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Emmy. She also won her first Screen Actors Guild Award. In accordance to Lee Strasberg's method acting Jolie reportedly prefers to stay in character in between scenes during many of her films which can make her difficult to deal with, depending on the character. While shooting Gia, she told her then-husband Jonny Lee Miller, she wouldn't be able to phone him. "I'd tell him: 'I'm alone; I'm dying; I'm gay; I'm not going to see you for weeks.'"
Following Gia Jolie moved to New York and stopped acting for a short period of time, because she felt like she had "nothing else to give". She enrolled at New York University to study filmmaking and attended writing classes. Jolie describe it as "just good for me to collect myself" on Inside the Actors Studio.
Jolie returned to the big screen playing Gloria McNeary in the 1998 gangster movie Hell's Kitchen and later that year headlined an ensemble cast that included Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Anthony Edwards, Gillian Anderson, Ryan Phillippe, and Madeline Stowe in Playing by Heart. The drama tells the story of several seemingly unconnected characters, with Jolie playing the young club-scene hipster Joan. The film received predominantly positive reviews and Jolie was praised in particular. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Jolie, working through an overwritten part, is a sensation as the desperate club crawler learning truths about what she's willing to gamble." Jolie won the Breakthrough Award by the National Board of Review.
In 1999 she starred in the Mike Newell's comedy-drama Pushing Tin, about two air traffic controllers who engage in macho conflict, co-starring alongside John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. Jolie played Thornton's seductive wife Mary Bell. The film got a lukewarm reception from critics and Jolie's character was particularly criticized. The Washington Post wrote, "Mary (Angelina Jolie), a completely ludicrous writer's creation of a free-spirited woman who weeps over hibiscus plants that die, wears lots of turquoise rings and gets real lonely when Russell spends entire nights away from home." She then worked with Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector, an adapted crime novel written by Jeffery Deaver. Jolie plays Amelia Donaghy, a police officer haunted by her cop father's suicide who is reluctant to help Washington tracking down a serial killer. The movie grossed $151 million worldwide, but was a critical failure; the Detroit Free Press concluded, "Jolie, while always delicious to look at, is simply and woefully miscast."
Then, Jolie took the supporting role of Lisa Rowe alongside Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted, a film that tells the story of female mental patient Susanna Kaysen and was adapted from Kaysen's original memoir 'Girl Interrupted'. The movie was supposed to be a return to dramatic form for Ryder, but instead became the welcome-to-Hollywood coronation for Jolie. For her portrait of wild-girl inmate Lisa she won her third Golden Globe, her second Screen Actors Guild Award as well as an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. Variety noted, "Jolie is excellent as the flamboyant, irresponsible girl who turns out to be far more instrumental than the doctors in Susanna's rehabilitation" and Roger Ebert wrote about her performance:
Angelina Jolie
Jolie is emerging as one of the great wild spirits of current movies, a loose cannon who somehow has deadly aim.
Angelina Jolie
In 2000 Jolie appeared in her first summer blockbuster Gone In 60 Seconds, where she played Sarah "Sway" Wayland, ex-girlfriend of super-car-thief Nicolas Cage. She did not have much screen time and the Washington Post criticized that "all she does in this movie is stand around, cooling down, modeling those fleshy, pulsating muscle-tubes that nest so provocatively around her teeth." She later explained that the film was a welcome relief from all the heavy roles she played before and it would turn out to be her highest grossing movie up until then, with $237 million internationally.
Superstardom, 2001–present
Following her Oscar success, Jolie was a well respected actress in Hollywood, but it was the 2001 videogame adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider that made her an international superstar. To play videogame heroine Lara Croft, she had to master a British accent and extensive martial arts training which she managed convincingly. Jolie was generally praised for her physical performance, but the movie generated mostly negative reviews. Slant Magazine commented, "Angelina Jolie was born to play Lara Croft but [director] Simon West makes her journey into a game of Frogger." The movie was a huge international success nonetheless, earning $275 million worldwide and started her reputation as the top female action star. She earned a reported $7 million which put her into the highest league of female actresses.
Jolie then starred alongside Antonio Banderas as the mail order bride Julia Russell in Original Sin, a thriller based on the novel Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich. The film was a major critical failure, with The New York Times noting, "The story plunges more precipitously than Ms. Jolie's neckline." One year later in 2002 she played Lanie Kerrigan in Life or Something Like It, a film about an ambitious TV reporter who is told that she will die in a week. The film was reviewed poorly by critics, though Jolie's performance was often emphasized positively. CNN's Paul Clinton wrote, "Jolie is excellent in her role. Despite some of the ludicrous plot points in the middle of the film, this Academy Award-winning actress is exceedingly believable in her journey towards self-discovery and the true meaning of fulfilling life."
Jolie reprised her role as Lara Croft in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life in 2003. The sequel couldn’t achieve the success of the original, but it still was a solid hit with over $156 million at the international box-office. Jolie was paid $12 million for this second instalment. Later that year Jolie starred in Beyond Borders, a film about aid workers in Africa. Although well-intentioned, and reflecting Jolie's real-life interest in promoting humanitarian relief, the film was critically and financially unsuccessful. The Los Angeles Times wrote, "Jolie, as she did in her Oscar-winning role in 'Girl, Interrupted', can bring electricity and believability to roles that have a reality she can understand. She can also, witness the 'Lara Croft' films, do acknowledged cartoons. But the limbo of a hybrid character, a badly written cardboard person in a fly-infested, blood-and-guts world, completely defeats her."
In 2004 Jolie first starred alongside Ethan Hawke in the thriller Taking Lives, where she plays FBI profiler Illeana Scott who is summoned to help out Canadian law enforcement in Montreal, to hunt down a serial killer. The movie received mixed reviews and The Hollywood Reporter concluded, "Angelina Jolie plays a role that definitely feels like something she has already done, but she does add an unmistakable dash of excitement and glamour." She also lent her voice to Lola in the animated DreamWorks movie Shark Tale; the cast included Will Smith, Martin Scorsese, Renée Zellweger, Jack Black and Robert De Niro. Also in 2004, Jolie had a brief appearance as Franky in Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a science fiction adventure film shot with actors entirely in front of a bluescreen, with all the sets and nearly all of the props computer-generated. Jolie then played Olympias in Oliver Stone’s biopic Alexander about the life of Alexander the Great. The film failed domestically, partly due to criticism regarding Alexander’s homosexuality, but succeeded internationally with $139 million outside the United States. Newsday wrote about Jolie's performance, "Jolie is the only one in the picture who seems to be having any fun with her role, and one misses her whenever she's off-screen."
Jolie's only movie of 2005, the action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is also her biggest commercial success to date. The film was directed by Doug Liman and tells the story about a bored married couple who find out that they're both secret assassins. Jolie starred as Jane Smith alongside Brad Pitt. The film was received amicably and generally lauded for the good chemistry between the two leads. The Star Tribune noted, "While the story feels haphazard, the movie gets by on gregarious charm, galloping energy and the stars' thermonuclear screen chemistry." The movie earned over $478 million worldwide, one of the biggest hits of 2005.
Jolie filmed her part in Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd during the second half of 2005, a movie about the early history of the CIA through the eyes of Edward Wilson, played by Matt Damon. Jolie will co-star as Clover Wilson, Damon's wife who becomes an alcoholic through the course of the movie. The film is set to be due out in December of 2006
Jolie's confirmed future projects include the animated movies Beowulf (playing Grendel's mother) and Kung Fu Panda, as well as A Mighty Heart, a film based on the life of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan; she will star as Pearl’s wife, Mariane Pearl. She will also appear in the movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged and is rumored to be involved in Sin City 2, while she is not starring in a third Tomb Raider movie, as it was falsely reported.
Relationships
On March 28, 1996, Jolie married British actor Jonny Lee Miller, her co-star in the film Hackers. She attended her wedding in black leather trousers and a white shirt, which had her groom's name painted in her blood on the back. Jolie and Miller separated one year later and subsequently divorced on February 3, 1999. Both remained on good terms and Jolie later explained, "It comes down to timing. I think he's the greatest husband a girl could ask for. I'll always love him, we were simply too young."
Jolie then married American actor Billy Bob Thornton who she had met on the set of Pushing Tin on May 5, 2000. As a result of their frequent public declarations of passion and gestures of love (most famously wearing one another's blood in vials around their necks), their relationship became a favorite topic of the entertainment media. Jolie and Thornton divorced on May 27, 2003. Asked in Vogue about the sudden dissolution of their marriage, Jolie stated, "It took me by surprise, too, because overnight, we totally changed. I think one day we had just nothing in common. And it's scary but... I think it can happen when you get involved and you don't know yourself yet."
Jolie has said in interviews that she is bisexual and has long acknowledged that she had a sexual relationship with her Foxfire co-star Jenny Shimizu, "I would probably have married Jenny if I hadn't married my husband. I fell in love with her the first second I saw her." In an interview with Barbara Walters in 2003, asked if she was bisexual, Jolie responded, "Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it's okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!"
In early 2005, Jolie found herself in the middle of a well-publicized Hollywood scandal when she was accused of being the "other woman" in the divorce of actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. The allegation was that she and Pitt had started an affair during filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. However, in several interviews she has denied starting an affair with Pitt. In an interview with Ann Curry in 2005, she explained, "To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn't be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife."
While Jolie and Pitt never publicly commented about the nature of their relationship, speculations continued throughout 2005. The first intimate paparazzi photos emerged in April, one month after Aniston had filed for divorce; the now-famous pictures show Pitt, Jolie and her son Maddox at a beach in Kenya. During the summer Jolie and Pitt were seen together with increasing frequency and most of the entertainment media considered them a couple, dubbing them "Brangelina". On January 11, 2006 Jolie confirmed to People that she was pregnant with Pitt's child and thereby confirming their relationship for the first time in public.
