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Angelina Jolie born June 4, 1975 is an American actress and director. 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. Jolie promotes humanitarian causes, and is noted for her work with refugees as a Special Envoy and former Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She has been cited as the world's "most beautiful" woman, a title for which she has received substantial media attention.
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).
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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 sequel The Cradle of Life (2003). She reinforced her reputation as a leading action star with Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) and Wanted (2008)—her biggest non-animated commercial successes to date 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. Jolie made her directorial debut with the wartime drama In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011).
Divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton, Jolie now lives with actor Brad Pitt, in a relationship notable for fervent 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, and on her mother's side, she is of primarily French Canadian, Dutch, and German ancestry. Like her mother, Jolie has stated that she is part Iroquois; her only known Native ancestor was a Huron woman born in 1649.
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After her parents' separation in 1976, Jolie and her brother lived with their mother, who abandoned her acting ambitions to focus on raising her children. 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. When she was six years old, her mother and stepfather, filmmaker Bill Day, moved the family to Palisades, New York; they returned to Los Angeles five years later. She then 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. 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. Two years later, after the relationship had ended, she rented an apartment above a garage a few blocks from her mother's home. She graduated from high school and returned to theater studies, 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.
Jolie suffered episodes of suicidal depression throughout her teens and early twenties. 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. She found it difficult to emotionally connect with other people, and as a result she started to self-harm; 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." She also began experimenting with drugs; by the age of 20, she had tried "just about every drug possible," including heroin.
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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. They reconciled and he appeared with her in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), but their relationship again deteriorated. 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. In August of that year, Voight claimed 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. She explained that because she had adopted her son Maddox, she did not think it was healthy for her to associate with Voight. In the wake of her beloved mother's death from ovarian cancer on January 27, 2007, Jolie again reconciled with her father after a six-year estrangement.
In the media
During the first decade of her career, Jolie—who does not employ a publicist or an agent—maintained a "wild child" persona in her communication with the media. She openly discussed her love life, including her bisexuality and her interest in BDSM. After she kissed her brother during the Academy Awards in 2000, their close relationship became the subject of tabloid media speculation, which she dismissed. She spoke about her experiences with drugs and depression, and recalled the time, in 1997, when she almost hired a hitman to kill her, as well as the three days, just before her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton, that she was sectioned at UCLA's psychiatric ward. By the mid-2000s, Jolie's involvement with the UNHCR and the adoption of her son Maddox had transformed her public image from Hollywood eccentric into humanitarian and devoted mother.
Jolie has attracted notable media attention for her physical appearance—particularly her full lips and her many tattoos, being her most distinctive features. She has been named the world's "most beautiful" or "sexiest" woman by various media outlets, including Vogue in 2002, Esquire in 2004, American FHM and British Harper's Bazaar in 2005, People and Hello! in 2006, Empire in 2007, and Vanity Fair in 2009. Jolie's extensive collection of tattoos has often been addressed by interviewers. She has fourteen known tattoos, among which the Latin proverb "quod me nutrit me destruit" (what nourishes me destroys me), the Tennessee Williams quote "A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages," two sak yant designs featuring a prayer of protection and a twelve-inch-by-eight-inch tiger, and six sets of geographical coordinates indicating the origins of her children. Over time, she has covered or lasered several of her tattoos, including the name of her second husband, "Billy Bob", and the Chinese characters (death) and (courage). Jolie holds a private pilot license and owns a single-engine Cirrus SR22 aircraft.
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Today, Jolie is one of the best-known celebrities around the world. According to the Q Score, in 2000, subsequent to her Oscar win, 31% of respondents in the United States said Jolie was familiar to them; by 2006 she was familiar to 81% of Americans. In a 2006 global industry survey by ACNielsen in 42 international markets, Jolie, together with her partner Brad Pitt, was found to be the favorite celebrity endorser for brands and products worldwide. She was the face of St. John and Shiseido from 2006 to 2008, and in 2011 had an endorsement deal with Louis Vuitton reportedly worth $10 million—a record for a single advertising campaign. She was among the Time 100, a list of the most influential people in the world as assembled by Time, in 2006 and 2008. Forbes named her Hollywood's highest-paid actress in 2009 and 2011, with estimated annual earnings of $27 million and $30 million respectively, and she topped the magazine's Celebrity 100, a ranking of the world's most powerful celebrities, in 2009. People named her one of 2012's Most Beautiful at Every Age.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelina_Jolie
