Angelina Jolie is an American actress who is renowned for her exotic looks, full lips, wild child image, numerous tattoos and humanitarian work with refugees. She has received three Golden Globes as well as an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Lisa Rowe in the movie Girl, Interrupted. Additionally, Jolie has starred in five student movies, all of which were directed by her brother James Haven.
In July 2005, Jolie became the third actress to join the coveted "$20 Million Club" of actresses commanding fees of $20 million per movie. She joined Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts when she signed to do Mr and Mrs Smith for that amount. Jolie became a citizen of Cambodia by decree of its King Norodom Sihamoni on August 11, 2005; the citizenship was awarded to her in honor of her environmental work in the country. She is expected to retain her American citizenship.
Jolie is the daughter of actor Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is of Czech, French-Canadian, and Iroquois descent. As a child she dreamed of becoming a funeral director. She attended the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute from the age of 11, later attending Beverly Hills High School. Though she enrolled at the film school at New York University after finishing Gia, she did not complete her studies.
Jolie has been long estranged from her father, though a reconciliation was attempted by his appearing with her in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. In the October 2004 issue of Premiere Magazine, Jolie indicated that she was no longer interested in pursuing a relationship with her father. Soon after, he claimed that she has "serious emotional problems" on Access Hollywood, and she legally dropped Voight as her last name.
Jolie during a UNHCR mission.
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Jolie during a UNHCR mission.
Jolie has been a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees since 2001, and frequently travels to remote countries to draw attention to the plight of people in Third World nations. In 2003, she published Notes from My Travels, a collection of journal entries chronicling her early work with the U.N.. In a January 2005 interview with Reuters, Jolie criticized fellow actors for not being committed enough in helping others, and stated that she gives one-third of her income to charitable organizations.
Jolie was also one of the first celebrities to accept an invitation to be one of the bearers of the Olympic Torch during the 2004 Olympic Games, though she was ultimately unable to participate due to filming commitments.
In the fall of 2004, it was reported that Jolie has started proceedings to adopt another child, this time from Russia. However, no adoption ever took place.
Around the same time, Lauryn Galindo, the Hawaii-based adoption facilitator whose services Jolie had used to adopt Maddox, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to visa fraud and money laundering charges. She had been falsifying records of children to be adopted in visa applications to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and several of the children she placed had not been abandoned at all but were enticed away or bought from their birth families. There is no evidence that Maddox was among them, although the investigation is continuing.
Besides her acting and humanitarian endeavors, Jolie also worked as a professional model in London, New York and Los Angeles and appeared in numerous music videos including those of Meat Loaf, Lenny Kravitz, and The Rolling Stones.
For several years prior to mid 2005, Jolie did not have a hit movie. Several of her movies, such as Alexander, Sky Captain, and Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life were major box office disappointments although Jolie usually received good notices. She did provide the voice of Lola in the successful animated film, Shark Tale. Nonetheless she remains one of Hollywood's most in-demand actresses.
In early 2005, Jolie found herself at the center of a well-publicized Hollywood scandal when she was accused of being the "other woman" in the marital break-up of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. The allegation was that she and Pitt had started an affair during filming of the spy comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith, something she denies.
Thanks to a mixture of generally good reviews and advance publicity due to all the rumors, Mr. and Mrs. Smith opened in the No. 1 position at the box office after it was released in early June 2005, providing Jolie with her first box-office success in several years.
In March 2005, Jolie was named the third sexiest woman in the world by FHM magazine, from fifteen million votes worldwide.
Since taking on her goodwill ambassador duties, Jolie has on numerous occasions made public statements that she wants to quit acting and concentrate of her UN work (for example, see Ireland On-Line in June 2005). However, she has also stated that her work provides the income necessary for her to continue travelling the world on behalf of the UN.
Jolie continues to balance the demands of being a movie star with that of being a humanitarian, despite an apparently grueling schedule. On June 7, 2005, the Associated Press wire service reported on Jolie giving a presentation in Islamabad, Pakistan. That very same day, she attended the premiere of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in Los Angeles.
She now lives full-time in Buckinghamshire, UK and reportedly plans to purchase property in Cambodia.
In late June 2005, the New York Post reported a claim that Jolie is pregnant, a report republished on June 30 by Britain's Sky TV, Sun Media Corporation in Canada, and the Asian Hindustan Times, among others. Her publicists presently deny this report. On July 5, 2005, People magazine reported that Jolie was in the final stages of adopting a baby girl, who had been orphaned by AIDS, from Ethiopia. Jolie has named her daughter Zahara Marley Jolie.
The American magazine US Weekly, in reporting Jolie's second adoption, indicated erroneously that Jolie and Pitt had adopted the girl together. When the magazine realized its error, the presses were stopped and an apology issued to Jolie and Pitt; printing of the issue resumed with the correction made, though a number of copies with the error were still released to the public. Reportedly, however, Pitt was present when Jolie signed the adoption papers.
Cambodia's King Norodom Sihamoni awarded Jolie a Cambodian citizenship for her conservation work in the country.
