Angelina Jolie

• 1. Introduction

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  Angelina Jolie has appeared in films that grossed more than $6.9 billion worldwide, and Hollywood has named her its highest-paid actress several times. As a teenager, though, she took at-home courses on embalming because she hoped to become a funeral director. Born Angelina Jolie Voight on the 4th of June 1975, she would go on to win an Academy Award, direct war dramas and travel to refugee camps and conflict zones around the world. How did a girl who felt like an outsider in her own school become one of the best-known people in American entertainment? What was her relationship with her famous father? And what happened when she described a private medical decision in a newspaper essay?

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• 2. The Punk Outsider

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  Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles was where Jolie was born to the actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She has a brother, the actor James Haven, and her godparents are the actors Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell. Her ancestry is German and Slovak on her father's side and Dutch and French on her mother's. Jolie once claimed distant Iroquois ancestry through her French-Canadian mother. Her father later said she was 'not seriously Iroquois' and explained that he and Bertrand had made the story up to make Bertrand seem more 'exotic.'

  In 1976 her parents separated, and Jolie and her brother stayed with their mother, who gave up her own acting ambitions to raise them. Bertrand brought her daughter up as a Catholic but did not require her to attend church. Jolie has credited the films she watched with her mother, rather than her father's successful career, for sparking her interest in acting. When she was six, Bertrand and her partner, the filmmaker Bill Day, moved the family to Palisades, New York. They returned to Los Angeles five years later, and Jolie enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she trained for two years.

  Beverly Hills High School turned out to be a lonely place for her. She felt out of step among the children of wealthy families because her mother earned a modest income. Classmates teased her for being extremely thin and for wearing glasses and braces, and early modeling attempts at her mother's insistence went nowhere. She moved to Moreno High School, an alternative school, and became a 'punk outsider' who wore all black and went out moshing. She dropped her acting classes. At sixteen she graduated, rented her own apartment and returned to theater studies.

  The struggle underneath was heavier than the costume suggested. As a teenager she found it hard to connect emotionally with other people, and she dealt with insomnia and an eating disorder. She also had episodes of depression. By twenty she had used, in her words, 'just about every drug possible,' particularly heroin. At twenty-four she had a nervous breakdown and spent 72 hours in the psychiatric ward of UCLA Medical Center. Two years later she adopted her first child, Maddox, and found stability. 'I knew once I committed to Maddox, I would never be self-destructive again,' she later said.

  Jon Voight left the family when his daughter was less than a year old. Jolie has said that their time together afterward was sporadic and usually carried out in front of the press. At age seven she had a bit part in his film Lookin' to Get Out, released in 1982. In the early 1990s the two were on easier terms. She watched how he observed people in order to become them, and she decided that they were both 'drama queens.'

  They reconciled while appearing together in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001, but the bond frayed again. Jolie petitioned a court to drop the surname Voight in favor of her middle name, Jolie, which she had long used as a stage name. The change was granted on the 12th of September 2002. Voight then went public with the estrangement on Access Hollywood, claiming his daughter had 'serious mental problems.' Her mother and brother cut off contact with him too. Jolie and her father did not speak for six-and-a-half years. They began rebuilding after Bertrand died of ovarian cancer on the 27th of January 2007, and they went public with the reconciliation three years later. The disease that killed Bertrand left Jolie with a family medical history that she would one day act on in public.

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• 3. Cyborg to Oscar

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  Casting directors kept telling sixteen-year-old Jolie that her demeanor was 'too dark.' She had committed to acting professionally, yet auditions rarely went well. Work came instead from five of her brother's student films at the USC School of Cinema-Television and from music videos, including Lenny Kravitz's 'Stand by My Woman' and Meat Loaf's 'Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through.' In 1993 she also appeared on the cover of the Widespread Panic album Everyday.

  Cyborg 2, a direct-to-video science-fiction sequel made in 1993, gave her a first leading role as a near-human robot designed for corporate espionage and assassination. She was so disappointed that she did not audition again for a year. Her next big step was Hackers in 1995, her first major studio film. It failed to make a profit at the box office but built a cult following after its video release, and it is regarded as her breakthrough.

  The notices that followed were uneven. In Foxfire in 1996 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 that she had the presence to overcome the stereotype. In 1997 she starred with David Duchovny in the thriller Playing God, and Roger Ebert thought she seemed too nice to be a mobster's girlfriend. The CBS miniseries True Women fared worse, and Robert Strauss of The Philadelphia Inquirer called her 'horrid, a fourth-rate Scarlett O'Hara.'

  George Wallace, a 1997 TNT film about the segregationist Alabama governor, played by Gary Sinise, changed her fortunes. Jolie played his second wife, Cornelia Wallace, and won a Golden Globe Award along with a Primetime Emmy nomination. The next year she played the supermodel Gia Carangi in HBO's Gia, which follows Carangi's heroin addiction and her death from AIDS in the mid-1980s. Jolie won a second consecutive Golden Globe, another Emmy nomination and her first Screen Actors Guild Award.

  Following Lee Strasberg's method acting, Jolie often stayed in character between scenes. While shooting Gia, she told her husband, Jonny Lee Miller, that she could not phone him. 'I'd tell him: 'I'm alone; I'm dying; I'm gay; I'm not going to see you for weeks.'' When filming ended she briefly quit acting, feeling that she had 'nothing else to give.' She moved to New York and took night classes at New York University in directing and screenwriting. The Golden Globe and the praise for Gia drew her back to the screen.

  Playing by Heart in 1998 placed her in an ensemble with Sean Connery, Gillian Anderson and Ryan Phillippe, and the National Board of Review gave her its Breakthrough Performance Award. In 1999 she appeared in Pushing Tin and then in The Bone Collector opposite Denzel Washington. That thriller grossed $151.5 million worldwide, though critics were unkind.

  Girl, Interrupted, released in 1999, was adapted from Susanna Kaysen's 1993 memoir. Jolie played Lisa, a sociopathic patient in a psychiatric hospital. Emanuel Levy of Variety called her excellent as the flamboyant, irresponsible girl who proves more useful to Susanna's recovery than the doctors do. The role brought a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

  Gone in 60 Seconds, released in 2000, was her first summer blockbuster. Playing the mechanic ex-girlfriend of a car thief portrayed by Nicolas Cage, she helped it earn $237.2 million internationally, her best result to that point. Jolie later said the film was a welcome relief after the emotionally demanding Girl, Interrupted. Her next role, a heroine from a video game series, would turn her into an international name.

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• 4. Box Office Power

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  For Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001, Jolie learned an English accent and trained extensively in martial arts to play the archaeologist-adventurer. Reviews of the film were mostly negative, yet John Anderson of Newsday wrote that she made the title character 'a virtual icon of female competence and coolth.' The film earned $274.7 million worldwide and launched her reputation as a global female action star.

  What followed was a run of films that neither critics nor audiences embraced. In Original Sin, from 2001, she played the mail-order bride of Antonio Banderas. Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times questioned why she followed an Oscar win with 'soft-core nonsense.' The romantic comedy Life or Something Like It in 2002 also failed. Still, from 2002 she earned $10-15 million per film for the next five years, among the highest salaries for an actress.

  The 2003 sequel Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life earned $156.5 million at the international box office, less than the original. Beyond Borders that year cast her as a socialite who joins an aid worker played by Clive Owen. Audiences stayed away, but it was the first of several passion projects meant to draw attention to humanitarian causes.

  In 2004 she appeared in four films: Taking Lives, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the DreamWorks animation Shark Tale, and Oliver Stone's Alexander. In Alexander she played Queen Olympias, and her Slavic accent drew mixed reactions. The film failed in North America, which Stone blamed on disapproval of its depiction of Alexander's bisexuality. Abroad it grossed $167.3 million.

  Mr. & Mrs. Smith in 2005 brought her back to major box office success. She starred opposite Brad Pitt as a bored married couple who discover that both are secret assassins. Reviews were mixed, but critics praised the chemistry between the leads. With $478.2 million worldwide, it was the seventh-highest-grossing picture of the year and remained her top live-action earner for the next decade.

  A Mighty Heart in 2007 cast her as Mariane Pearl, whose husband, the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. Pearl had personally chosen Jolie for the part. The casting still drew racial criticism and accusations of blackface, though the performance itself was widely praised. That year she also played Grendel's mother in the motion-capture epic Beowulf, which earned $196.4 million worldwide.

  By 2008 Jolie was the highest-paid actress, earning $15-20 million per film. While other actresses took salary cuts, her box office appeal let her command as much as $20 million plus a percentage. Wanted, with James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman, earned $341.4 million worldwide. Then came Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood, which brought nominations for a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a BAFTA and the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also voiced Tigress in the Kung Fu Panda films from 2008 to 2016.

  After losing her mother, Jolie made fewer films. She later explained that her motivation to act had grown out of her mother's own acting ambitions. Salt in 2010 was her first film in two years. The role was written for a man, with Tom Cruise attached, until a Columbia Pictures executive suggested Jolie, and the film earned $293.5 million. The Tourist, with Johnny Depp, was a critical failure, though Roger Ebert defended her performance.

  Maleficent in 2014 ended a three-and-a-half-year absence from the screen. Its opening weekend brought nearly $70 million in North America and over $100 million in other markets. Sherri Linden of The Hollywood Reporter called Jolie the 'heart and soul' of the film. It finished at $757.8 million worldwide, the fourth-highest of the year and her biggest hit ever. The 2019 sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, took $490 million. In 2021 she played Thena, a warrior with post-traumatic stress disorder, in the Marvel film Eternals.

  In 2024 Pablo Larraín's Maria premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, with Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas in her final days. Tomris Laffly of RogerEbert.com called it a 'career-best performance' and wrote that Jolie grasped the grief of a once-in-a-generation singer who was losing her voice. Jolie earned another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress.

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• 5. Behind the Camera

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  The documentary A Place in Time, distributed in 2007 through the National Education Association, was Jolie's first work as a director. Her feature debut came in 2011 with In the Land of Blood and Honey, a love story between a Serb soldier and a Bosniak prisoner during the 1992-95 Bosnian War. She conceived it after twice visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina on missions for the United Nations refugee agency, hoping to rekindle attention for the survivors.

  To keep the film authentic, she cast only actors from the former Yugoslavia, including Goran Kostić and Zana Marjanović. She worked their own wartime experiences into her screenplay. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter credited her with a powerfully oppressive atmosphere, noting that those same strengths would make some viewers not want to watch. The film earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and Sarajevo made her an honorary citizen for raising awareness of the war.

  Unbroken, from 2014, told the story of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic track star who survived a plane crash in World War II and then spent two years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Zamperini lived from 1917 to 2014. The film was based on Laura Hillenbrand's book, scripted by the Coen brothers and starred Jack O'Connell, with Jolie also producing under her Jolie Pas banner. Early buzz suggested Best Picture and Best Director contention, but reviews turned mixed and awards were scarce. The National Board of Review and the American Film Institute still named it one of the year's best. Justin Chang of Variety called it 'an extraordinary story told in dutiful, unexceptional terms.'

  By the Sea, from 2015, was a marital drama that Jolie wrote and directed, starring opposite her husband, Brad Pitt. She drew inspiration from her own mother's life. Critics dismissed it as a 'vanity project,' and Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post found it gorgeous but emotionally empty. It received only a limited release.

  First They Killed My Father, from 2017, was set in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge era. Jolie directed it and co-wrote the screenplay with her longtime friend Loung Ung, whose memoirs about the regime's child labor camps supplied the story. It was made directly for Netflix, which allowed an exclusively Khmer cast and script for a primarily Cambodian audience. The film earned nominations for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language.

  In 2024 Jolie wrote, produced and directed Without Blood, based on Alessandro Baricco's novel and starring Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir. That year she was also a producer on the musical The Outsiders after it moved to Broadway. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

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• 6. Refugee Envoy

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  Cambodia, during the filming of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001, gave Jolie her first look at the effects of a humanitarian crisis. She later credited the experience with giving her a greater understanding of the world. Back home, she contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, known as UNHCR, to ask about international trouble spots. She then began visiting refugee camps to learn more.

  Her first field visit came in February 2001, an 18-day mission to Sierra Leone and Tanzania that left her shocked by what she saw. In the following months she returned to Cambodia for two weeks and met Afghan refugees in Pakistan. There she gave $1 million in response to an emergency appeal, the largest donation UNHCR had ever received from a private individual. She covered every cost of her missions and shared the rudimentary living conditions of UNHCR field staff.

  On the 27th of August 2001, UNHCR headquarters in Geneva named her a Goodwill Ambassador. Over the next decade she went on more than 40 field missions and met refugees and displaced people in over 30 countries. In 2002 she was asked what she hoped to accomplish. 'Awareness of the plight of these people. I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon,' she answered. Her 2001-02 field visits became the book Notes from My Travels, published in October 2003 alongside Beyond Borders.

  Jolie sought out what she called 'forgotten emergencies,' crises that media attention had left behind. She became known for visiting war zones, including Sudan's Darfur region and the Syrian-Iraqi border during the Second Gulf War, where she met privately with U.S. troops. In Kabul, three aid workers were murdered during her first visit. In 2004 she started flying lessons so that she could ferry aid workers and food supplies, and she earned a pilot license that year. As of May 2014 she owned a Cirrus SR22 and a Cessna 208 Caravan.

  On the 17th of April 2012 she was promoted to Special Envoy to High Commissioner António Guterres, the first person to hold that position in the organization. The role gave her authority to represent Guterres at the diplomatic level. She joined him for a week-long tour of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq to assess the situation of refugees from neighboring Syria. She resigned in December 2022 and pledged to keep advocating for refugees.

  Before this work, tabloids had cast her as a 'wild child,' and profiles dwelt on her fascination with blood and knives, her experiences with drugs and her sex life. When she won her Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, she kissed her brother on the lips and said, 'I'm so in love with my brother right now.' Tabloids spun incest rumors. Jolie explained that, as children of divorce, she and James relied on one another for emotional support. She called it disappointing that something so beautiful and pure could be turned into a circus.

  Her reputation shifted after she became a Goodwill Ambassador at age 26. 'In my early 20s I was fighting with myself. Now I take that punk in me to Washington, and I fight for something important,' she said. Her Q Score, a marketing measure of how well liked a celebrity is, nearly doubled to 25 between 2000 and 2006. By 2006 she was familiar to 81% of Americans, up from 31% in 2000. She became known for shaping her image through the media without a publicist or an agent. YouGov surveys in 2015 and 2016 found her the most admired woman in the world.

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• 7. Cambodia and Causes

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  In 2003 Jolie bought a traditional house on 39 hectares in Battambang province, in northwestern Cambodia, partly to connect her adopted son with his birth country. The land sat beside Samlout national park in the Cardamom Mountains, which poachers threatening endangered species had infiltrated. She bought the park's 60,000 hectares and turned them into a wildlife reserve named for her son, the Maddox Jolie Project.

  In November 2006 the project expanded and became the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation, built to create Asia's first Millennium Village in line with UN development goals. The idea came after she met the economist Jeffrey Sachs, founder of Millennium Promise, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where she was an invited speaker in 2005 and 2006. The two filmed a 2005 MTV special at a Millennium Village in western Kenya. By mid-2007 some 6,000 villagers and 72 employees lived and worked at the Cambodian site, spread across ten villages that had once been isolated from one another. Some employees were former poachers who now worked as rangers. Jolie funded the schools, roads and a soy milk factory, and her home served as field headquarters.

  Cambodia also gave her a new nationality. In 2004 Prime Minister Hun Sen offered her Cambodian citizenship in recognition of her humanitarian work. In 2005 King Norodom Sihamoni completed the process by royal decree.

  After filming Beyond Borders in Namibia, Jolie became patron of the Harnas Wildlife Foundation, a wildlife orphanage and medical center in the Kalahari Desert. The film features vultures that the foundation had rescued. In December 2010 she and Brad Pitt established the Shiloh Jolie-Pitt Foundation to support conservation work by the Naankuse Wildlife Sanctuary, another Kalahari reserve. Their funding has paid for large-animal conservation projects, a free health clinic, housing and a school for the San Bushmen community.

  The Education Partnership for Children of Conflict was founded at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in September 2007, and Jolie co-chairs it with the economist Gene Sperling. In its first year it supported projects for Iraqi refugee children, youth affected by the Darfur conflict and girls in rural Afghanistan. Since April 2013 all proceeds from her jewelry collection, Style of Jolie, have supported its work. She also launched the Malala Fund at the 2013 Women in the World Summit and personally contributed over $200,000.

  Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya has a school and boarding facility for girls that she funded, opened in 2005. In eastern Afghanistan she funded two girls' primary schools, in Tangi and Qalai Gudar, which opened in March 2010 and November 2012. By 2005 she had built at least ten other schools in Cambodia. In February 2006 she opened the Maddox Chivan Children's Center in Phnom Penh, a medical and educational facility for children affected by HIV.

  Washington, D.C. became another front. Since October 2008 Jolie has co-chaired Kids in Need of Defense, known as KIND, a network of leading U.S. law firms that provide free legal aid to unaccompanied minors in immigration proceedings. It was founded in collaboration with Microsoft, and by 2013 it was the principal provider of pro bono lawyers for immigrant children. Explaining why she lobbied there from 2003, she said, 'As much as I would love to never have to visit Washington, that's the way to move the ball.'

  In May 2012 Jolie launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative with the British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who had been inspired to campaign on the issue by her film In the Land of Blood and Honey. In June 2014 she co-chaired the four-day Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, the largest meeting ever held on the subject. It produced a protocol endorsed by 151 nations. In May 2016 she became a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, supporting a postgraduate program at its Centre on Women, Peace and Security.

  In November 2013 she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Academy Award. In June 2014 she was appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for her services to the UK's foreign policy and her campaigning to end sexual violence in war zones. Queen Elizabeth II presented the insignia during a private ceremony the following October.

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• 8. Family and Choices

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  In March 1996, soon after they met during the making of Hackers, Jolie married the actor Jonny Lee Miller. She wore black rubber pants and a white T-shirt on which she had written the groom's name in her blood. The marriage ended the following year, with Jolie saying her busy work schedule kept them apart. She called Miller 'a solid man and a solid friend.' Her divorce petition came in February 1999.

  On the 5th of May 2000, after a two-month courtship, she married the actor Billy Bob Thornton in Las Vegas. The two famously wore vials of each other's blood around their necks, and the marriage became a favorite subject of the entertainment media. They announced the adoption of a child from Cambodia in March 2002 and separated three months later. Their divorce was finalized on the 27th of May 2003.

  In October 2005 Jolie was accused of causing the end of Brad Pitt's marriage to Jennifer Aniston. She said she fell in love with Pitt during the filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith but dismissed allegations of an affair. In January 2006 she confirmed that they were expecting their first child together. During their 12-year relationship the media dubbed them 'Brangelina.' They announced their engagement in April 2012, legally married on the 14th of August 2014 and held a private wedding at Château Miraval in France on the 23rd of August 2014. They separated on the 15th of September 2016, and Jolie filed for divorce four days later, citing irreconcilable differences. They were declared legally single on the 12th of April 2019.

  Jolie has six children, three adopted and three biological. On the 10th of March 2002 she adopted her first child, seven-month-old Maddox Chivan, from a Cambodian orphanage. The U.S. government banned adoptions from Cambodia in December 2001 amid allegations of child trafficking, which halted the process. Her adoption facilitator was later convicted of visa fraud and money laundering, but her adoption was deemed lawful. She took custody in Namibia while filming Beyond Borders and, after separating from Thornton, adopted Maddox alone.

  On the 6th of July 2005 she adopted six-month-old Zahara Marley from an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. On the 19th of January 2006 a court granted her petition to change the children's surname to Jolie-Pitt, and Pitt adopted Maddox and Zahara soon after. To avoid the media frenzy around the couple, they traveled to Namibia for the birth of Shiloh Nouvel, born on the 27th of May 2006 in Swakopmund. They sold the first photos through Getty Images, and People and Hello! paid $4.1 million and $3.5 million, a record in celebrity photojournalism at that time. All proceeds went to UNICEF.

  On the 15th of March 2007 she adopted three-year-old Pax Thien from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City, applying alone because Vietnam did not allow unmarried couples to co-adopt. In July 2008 she gave birth in Nice, France, to twins, Knox Léon and Vivienne Marcheline. Their first pictures sold for a reported $14 million, the most expensive celebrity photographs ever taken, and the proceeds were donated to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

  On the 16th of February 2013, at age 37, Jolie had a preventive double mastectomy. Genetic testing had shown an 87% risk of breast cancer because of a defective BRCA1 gene. Her mother had also had breast cancer, and her grandmother had died of ovarian cancer. Her aunt, who carried the same defect, died of breast cancer three months after Jolie's operation. The surgery lowered her risk to under five percent, and reconstructive surgery with implants and allografts followed.

  In March 2015, after annual tests suggested possible early signs of ovarian cancer, she had an ovary and fallopian tube removed. She faced a fifty percent risk of ovarian cancer from the same genetic anomaly. Despite hormone replacement therapy, the surgery brought on premature menopause.

  After each operation Jolie wrote about it in an op-ed for The New York Times, hoping to help other women make informed health choices. 'On a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity,' she wrote. A Time cover story dubbed the result 'The Angelina Effect.' BRCA testing referrals tripled in Australia and doubled in the United Kingdom, parts of Canada and India. They also rose significantly in other European countries and the United States. Researchers in Canada and the United Kingdom found that the share of mutation carriers stayed the same, meaning her message had reached those most at risk. In her first op-ed she had called for wider access to testing and acknowledged its high costs. Those costs fell greatly after a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling invalidated the BRCA gene patents held by Myriad Genetics.

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