Angelina Jolie (pronounced
/dʒoʊˈliː/ joh-lee, born
Angelina Jolie Voight; June 4, 1975) is an American actress. She has received an
Academy Award, two
Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three
Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by
Forbes in 2009 and 2011.
[1][2] Jolie is noted for promoting humanitarian causes as a
Goodwill Ambassador for the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She has been cited as the world's "sexiest" and "most beautiful" woman, titles for which she received substantial media attention.
[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
Jolie made her screen debut as a child alongside her father
Jon Voight in
Lookin' to Get Out (1982), but her film career began in earnest a decade later with the low-budget production
Cyborg 2 (1993). Her first leading role in a major film was in the cyber-thriller
Hackers (1995). She starred in the critically acclaimed biographical television 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).
Jolie achieved wide fame after her portrayal of video game heroine
Lara Croft in
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), and established herself among the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood with the
Tomb Raider sequel
The Cradle of Life (2003).
[11] She reinforced her reputation as a leading action star with
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) and
Wanted (2008), which marked her biggest non-animated commercial successes to date,
[12] and received further critical acclaim for her performances in the dramas
A Mighty Heart (2007) and
Changeling (2008), which earned her a nomination for an
Academy Award for Best Actress.
Divorced from actors
Jonny Lee Miller and
Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie now 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 three biological children, Shiloh, Knox, and Vivienne
Early life and family
Born in Los Angeles, California, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is the sister of actor James Haven, niece of singer-songwriter Chip Taylor, and goddaughter of actors Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell. On her father's side, Jolie is of German and Slovak descent,[13][14] and on her mother's side, she is of French Canadian, Dutch, and German ancestry.[13] She has also claimed to be part Iroquois through her mother,[15] although Voight has said that Bertrand was "not seriously Iroquois."[16]
After her parents' separation in 1976, Jolie and her brother went to live with their mother, who abandoned her acting ambitions to focus on raising her children.[17] 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.[18] When she was six years old, her mother and stepfather, filmmaker Bill Day, moved the family to Palisades, New York;[19] they returned to Los Angeles five years later. She 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.
At the age of 14, Jolie dropped out of her acting classes and aspired to become a funeral director.[20] She began working as a fashion model, modeling mainly in Los Angeles, New York, and London. During this period, she wore black clothing, experimented with knife play, and went out moshing with her live-in boyfriend.[18] Two years later, after the relationship had ended, she rented an apartment above a garage a few blocks from her mother's home.[17] She returned to theater studies and graduated from high school a year early, though in recent times she has referred to this period with the observation, "I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos."[21]
Jolie suffered episodes of suicidal depression throughout her teens and early twenties.[20] She felt isolated at Beverly Hills High School among the children of some of the area's affluent families, as her mother survived on a more modest income, and she was teased by other students, who targeted her for being extremely thin and for wearing glasses and braces.[18] She found it difficult to emotionally connect with other people, and as a result she started to self-harm;[15] later commenting, "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."[22] She also began experimenting with drugs; by the age of 20, she had tried "just about every drug possible," including heroin.[23]
Jolie has had a difficult relationship with her father. Due to Voight's marital infidelity and the resulting breakup of her parents' marriage, she was estranged from her father for many years.[24] They reconciled and he appeared with her in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), but their relationship again deteriorated.[17] In July 2002, Jolie—who had long used her middle name as a stage name to establish her own identity as an actress—filed a request to legally drop Voight as her surname, which was granted on September 12, 2002.[25] In August of that year, Voight claimed that his daughter had "serious mental problems" on Access Hollywood. In response, Jolie released a statement in which she indicated that she no longer wished to pursue a relationship with her father.[24] She stated that she did not want to publicize her reasons for their estrangement, but because she had adopted her son Maddox, she did not think it was healthy for her to associate with Voight.[26] In 2009, Jolie again reconciled with her father after a seven-year estrangement.[27
Career
When she was seven years old, Jolie had a small part in
Lookin' to Get Out (1982), a movie co-written by and starring her father,
Jon Voight. She committed to acting at the age of 16, but initially found it difficult to pass auditions, often being told that she was "too dark."
[20] She appeared in five of her brother's student films, made while he attended the
USC School of Cinematic Arts, as well as in several music videos, namely
Lenny Kravitz's "Stand by My Woman" (1991),
Antonello Venditti's "Alta Marea" (1991),
The Lemonheads's "It's About Time" (1993), and
Meat Loaf's "
Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through" (1993). She began to learn from her father, as she noticed his method of observing people to become like them. Their relationship during this time was less strained, with Jolie realizing that they were both "drama queens."
[18]
Jolie began her professional film career in 1993, when she played her first leading role in the low-budget, straight-to-video science-fiction sequel
Cyborg 2, as Casella "Cash" Reese, a near-human robot, designed to seduce her way into a rival manufacturer's headquarters and then self-detonate. Jolie was so disappointed with the film that she did not audition again for a year.
[20] Following a supporting role in the independent film
Without Evidence, Jolie starred as Kate "Acid Burn" Libby in her first Hollywood picture,
Hackers (1995).
The New York Times wrote, "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."
[28] The movie failed to make a profit at the box office, but developed a cult following after its video release.
[29]
She next appeared in the 1996 comedy
Love Is All There Is, a modern-day loose adaptation of
Romeo and Juliet set among two rival Italian family restaurant owners in
The Bronx, New York. In the road movie
Mojave Moon (1996) she played a young woman who falls for
Danny Aiello's middle-aged character, while he develops feelings for her mother, played by
Anne Archer. That same year, Jolie also portrayed Margret "Legs" Sadovsky, 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 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."
[30]
In 1997, Jolie starred with
David Duchovny in the thriller
Playing God, set in the Los Angeles underworld. The movie was not received well by critics;
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."
[31] She then appeared in the television film
True Women, a historical romantic drama set in the American West and based on the book by
Janice Woods Windle. That year, she also appeared as a stripper in the music video for "
Anybody Seen My Baby?" by the
Rolling Stones.
