Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie was born on June 4, 1975 in Los Angeles, California.

She is the daughter of actress Marcheline Bertrand and actor Jon Voight. She is the sister of actor James Haven and the niece of singer-songwriter Chip Taylor. Her godparents were actors Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell.

On her father's side she has German and Slovak ancestry, and on her mother's side, French-Canadian, Dutch and German.

After the separation of her parents in 1976, Jolie and her brother lived with her mother who left acting to dedicate herself to raising her children.

When she was six years old, she and her mother and her partner, filmmaker Bill Day, moved to the Palisades in Orangetown, Rockland County, New York. They returned to Los Angeles five years later.

During her time as a student she participated in a theater group, where she met other future stars such as Ed Harris and Holly Hunter.

Following this experience, she enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Institute, where she trained for two years and appeared in various stage productions. She also attended Beverly Hills High School, where she said she felt isolated among the children of some of the more affluent families because her mother survived on a modest income.

She was teased for how thin she was, for wearing glasses and braces. She transferred her to Moreno High School, an alternative school, where she converted to punk.

She dropped out of her acting classes and her aspirations were to become a funeral director, so she studied embalming. At sixteen, she graduated from high school and rented her own apartment, before returning to acting studies.

She by then suffered from insomnia, an eating disorder and began experimenting with drugs. In her twenties, she said she had used "just about everything possible," particularly heroin. She suffered from bouts of depression and on two occasions she planned to commit suicide (at nineteen and at twenty-two, when she tried to hire a hitman to kill her). At the age of twenty-four, she experienced a nervous breakdown and spent 72 hours in the psychiatric ward at UCLA Medical Center.

Two years later, she found stability in her life.

Jolie had a dysfunctional relationship with her father, which began when Voight left the family. They reconciled when they appeared together in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), but the relationship deteriorated again.

She petitioned a court to legally remove her last name "Voight" in favor of her middle name, which she had long used as her stage name; she was granted on September 12, 2002. They did not speak for more than six years, although they began to relate somewhat later after the death of her mother from ovarian cancer on January 27, 2007.

Angelina Jolie appeared at age seven in the 1982 film Lookin' to Get Out, co-written by her father. In 1993, she starred in the movie Cyborg 2. The movie didn't get good reviews and that made her very unmotivated.

She worked as a model and appeared in music videos for Lemonheads, Rolling Stones or Lenny Kravitz.

During 1995, she appeared in the movie Hackers which earned her great acclaim especially from The New York Times. In 1998 she appeared in the movie Hell's Kitchen, and also in Playing by Heart, alongside Sean Connery. She starred in Out of Control, alongside John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett. She later worked with Denzel Washington on The Bone Collector.

She played Lisa Rowe in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, based on the life of "Susanna Kaysen," which was played by actress Winona Ryder. Jolie won an Oscar for best supporting actress.

She later participated in Gone in 60 seconds, as the ex-girlfriend of a car thief played by Nicolas Cage.

During that year she starred with Spanish actor Antonio Banderas in the film Original Sin , based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich. In 2003 she returns to play "Lara Croft", in the film titled Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

During 2005 he made the action comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a commercial success, together with his romantic partner Brad Pitt.

In 2006, Jolie worked on the film The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and she made her directorial debut with the documentary A Place in Time, in 2007, about 27 different locations around the world in just one week.

She then starred in A Mighty Heart, about the murder of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. For it she received her fourth Golden Globe nomination and her third Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. That same year she worked on the animation Beowulf, based on the English poem of the same name, directed by Robert Zemeckis.

In 2008, she participated in Wanted, an adaptation of a graphic novel by Mark Millar, and voiced the Dreamworks film Kung Fu Panda. Clint Eastwood hired her for Changeling, a drama shot in December 2007 that gave her another Oscar nomination for best actress.

She shot Salt (2009) in New York and Washington D.C., suffering a minor head injury. Afterward, Jolie starred in Maleficent (2014) and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019).

In 2011, Jolie made her directorial debut, and was also the screenwriter, for In the Land of Blood and Honey, a film set in the Bosnian War. In the same year, she ranked first along with Sarah Jessica Parker in Forbes magazine's list of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood.

She participates in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), she visited humanitarian refugee camps in different parts of the world.

During the filming of Hackers (1995), she had an affair with British actor Jonny Lee Miller. They stopped dating for many months, but were finally married on March 28, 1996. She attended her wedding wearing black leather pants and a white T-shirt, on which she wrote the groom's name in her blood. They separated in September 1997 and divorced on February 3, 1999.

She began a relationship with actress and model Jenny Shimizu during the filming of Foxfire (1996). According to Shimizu, their relationship lasted for many years and continued even while Jolie was with other people. In 2003, when she was asked if she was bisexual, she replied, "Of course."

After dating for two months, she married actor Billy Bob Thornton on May 5, 2000, in Las Vegas. They met while working on Pushing Tin (1999), at which time Thornton was engaged to actress Laura Dern, while Jolie was dating actor Timothy Hutton, with whom she filmed Playing by Heart (1997). Jolie and Thornton announced the adoption of a Cambodian boy in March 2002; they separated three months later and divorced on May 27, 2003.

In early 2005, she was involved in a scandal when she was accused of being the reason for the divorce between actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

The thirty-year-old actress gave birth to a girl on May 27, 2006 in Namibia, the result of her relationship with Pitt. The couple decided to name her Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, which in Hebrew means peace or quiet.

After nine years of relationship and six children together, Brad Pitt (50) and Angelina Jolie (39) were married on August 23, 2014 at their property, the Chateau Miraval, France, in an intimate ceremony in the chateau chapel. The couple's six children were present and it was the eldest - Maddox and Pax - who led their mother down the aisle. Zahara and Vivienne threw flower petals while Shiloh and Knox carried the rings.

Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt after twelve years of relationship, citing "irreconcilable differences". The official separation occurred on September 15, 2016.

In the month of May 2013 she had undergone a double mastectomy, which she underwent in February and reconstructive surgery in April of the same year. The actress published a letter in The New York Times, where she explained that being a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, she drastically increased the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. In March 2015, she underwent a preventive double oophorectomy after learning that she had a 50% chance of developing ovarian cancer due to the gene defect.