Actress, humanitarian. Born Angelina Jolie Voight on June 4, 1975 in Los Angeles, California, to actor Jon Voight and French actress Marcheline Bertrand. She rose to stardom in the 1990s. She began acting at a young age, studying at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute while in her early teens. Jolie later attended New York University.
In the 1990s, Angelina Jolie became a popular actress. She gave a star-making performance in the 1998 television film Gia based on the short, tragic life of model Gia Marie Carangi, which won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.
Another great dramatic role in Girl, Interrrupted (1999) brought Jolie her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has continued to take on a variety of interesting roles, such as an adventurer in the Lara Croft films, a FBI profiler in Taking Lives (2004), an assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), and a neglected, troubled socialite wife in The Good Shepherd (2006).
In 2007, Jolie gave a brillant performance as Mariane Pearl, the pregnant widow of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, in A Mighty Heart. The film was based on Mariane Pearl's account of her husband's abduction and murder.
Jolie has drawn Oscar buzz for Clint Eastwood's missing-child drama Changeling, due for release October 24, 2008.
A devoted humanitarian, Angelina Jolie was made a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency in 2001. She has made headlines for her work to obtain aid for refugees in Cambodia, Darfur and Jordan, to name just a few.
In 2005, Jolie received the Global Humanitarian Action Award from the United Nations Association of the USA for her activism on behalf of refugee rights. She continues to travel the world to drawing attention to global issues.
Famous for her off-screen romances, Angelina Jolie has been married twice. She married Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller in 1995. The couple divorced in 1999. The next year Jolie married Academy Award-winning actor Billy Bob Thornton. That union lasted until 2003.
In 2002, Angelina Jolie adopted a son from Cambodia and named him Maddox. Three years later, she adopted a daughter, Zahara, and later in 2005, actor Brad Pitt filed paperwork to adopt both of Jolie’s children.
Jolie and Pitt met during the making of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 2004. The couple’s first biological daughter, Shiloh, was born in the African country of Namibia in 2006. Jolie, Pitt, and their children had traveled there to avoid the media frenzy that seemed to follow them wherever they went.
After the joy of welcoming her third child to the world came great sadness for Jolie. She experienced a great personal loss in the beginning of 2007—her mother died of cancer after fighting the disease for many years.