Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie (born Angelina Jolie Voight; June 4, 1975) is an American actress, filmmaker and humanitarian.

The recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards, she has been named Hollywood's highest-paid actress multiple times.

Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California, to actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand.

She is the sister of actor James Haven, and the niece of singer-songwriter Chip Taylor and geologist and volcanologist Barry Voight.

Her godparents are actors Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell.

On her father's side, Jolie is of German and Slovak descent.

Jolie has claimed to have distant Indigenous (Iroquois) ancestry through her French-Canadian mother.

However, her father says Jolie is "not seriously Iroquois", saying it is something he and Bertrand made up to make Bertrand seem more "exotic".

Following her parents' separation in 1976, she and her brother lived with their mother, who had abandoned her acting ambitions to focus on raising her children.

Jolie's mother raised her as a Catholic but did not require her to go to church.

Jolie made her screen debut as a child alongside her father, Jon Voight, in Lookin' to Get Out (1982).

As a child, she often watched films with her mother and it was this, rather than her father's successful career, that inspired her interest in acting, though she had a bit part in Voight's Lookin' to Get Out (1982) at age seven.

When Jolie was six years old, Bertrand and her live-in partner, filmmaker Bill Day, moved the family to Palisades, New York; they returned to Los Angeles five years later.

Jolie 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.

Jolie first attended Beverly Hills High School, where she felt isolated among the children of some of the area's affluent families because her mother had a more modest income.

She was teased by other students, who targeted her for being extremely thin and for wearing glasses and braces.

Her early attempts at modeling, at her mother's insistence, proved unsuccessful.

She transferred to Moreno High School, an alternative school, where she became a "punk outsider", wearing all-black clothing, going out moshing, and engaging in knife play with her live-in boyfriend.

She dropped out of her acting classes and aspired to become a funeral director, taking at-home courses on embalming.

Her film career began in earnest a decade later with the low-budget production Cyborg 2 (1993), followed by her first leading role in Hackers (1995).

She starred in the biographical television films George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998) and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a sociopath in the 1999 drama Girl, Interrupted.

Her role as the titular heroine in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) established her as a star.

At age 16, after the relationship had ended, Jolie graduated from high school and rented her own apartment before returning to theater studies, though in 2004 she referred to this period with the observation, "I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos."

As a teenager, Jolie found it difficult to emotionally connect with other people, and as a result she self-harmed, later commenting, "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 struggled with insomnia and an eating disorder and began using drugs; by age 20, she had used "just about every drug possible," particularly heroin.

Jolie had episodes of depression and planned to commit suicide twice—at age 19 and again at 22, when she attempted to hire a hitman to kill her.

When she was 24, she experienced a nervous breakdown and was admitted for 72 hours to UCLA Medical Center's psychiatric ward.

She continued her action-star career with Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Wanted (2008), and Salt (2010).

She also received critical acclaim for her performances in the dramas A Mighty Heart (2007) and Changeling (2008); the latter earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

She has performed a voice role in the animation film series Kung Fu Panda since 2008.

Jolie has also directed and written the war dramas In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), Unbroken (2014), and First They Killed My Father (2017).

Jolie is known for her humanitarian efforts, for which she has received a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and made an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, among other honors.

She promotes causes including conservation, education, and women's rights, and is most noted for her advocacy on behalf of refugees as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a position she held until 2022.

Jolie has undertaken over a dozen field missions globally to refugee camps and war zones.

As a public figure, Jolie has been cited as one of the most powerful and influential people in the American entertainment industry.

She has been cited as the world's most beautiful woman by various media outlets.

Her personal life, including her relationships, marriages, and health, has been the subject of wide publicity.

She is divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller, Billy Bob Thornton and Brad Pitt.

She has six children with Pitt, three of whom were adopted internationally.

Her biggest commercial successes include the fantasy picture Maleficent (2014), its 2019 sequel, and the superhero film Eternals (2021).