Angelina Jolie

Childhood

Jolie at Shark Tale Premiere

Angelina Jolie Voight was born in Los Angeles, California, on June 4, 1975. Her parents are the Oscar and Golden Globe winning actor Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand.

While she was still an infant, Voight and Bertrand divorced due to Voight's affair with actress Stacey Pickren, whom he lived with for several years afterwards. Meanwhile, Jolie lived with mother and her brother James Haven Voight. Reports are mixed as to how much of a role Jon Voight played in her childhood. Jolie graduated from Beverly Hills High School and attended both the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and the New York University.

She went on to work as a model, and then in 1993, at the age of 18, Jolie began her acting career playing a bit part in Cyborg 2.

The Good and the Bad

Angelina Jolie has received a mixed bag of publicity throughout her career that has included the good, the bad, and the freaky.

The Good Side of Angelina Jolie

While many will always see Angelina as just another pretty face, she has gone to extreme efforts to make a difference in the world. Among her admirable proactive efforts:

• Angelina Jolie adopted her son Maddox in 2002 from a Cambodian orphanage.
• In 2005, Angelina adopted Zahara, an AIDs orphan from Ethiopia.
• In 2001, she became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Since becoming an ambassador, she has made numerous trips to underprivileged nations, both to see first hand the conditions many of these poverty-stricken people live in and to raise awareness and funds to help these countries. For her continuous good works, she received the Global Humanitarian Award in 2005.
• In 2005, she began working with the Worldwide Orphans Foundation through the World Health Organization (WHO) toward the betterment of conditions for the children of Ethiopia who have been orphaned by AIDs and/or are HIV positive.

The Bad and the Freaky

It is not unusual for the media to report on the lives of the rich and the famous, but many celebrities are better at keeping their private lives private. Jolie has not been so lucky. Some of the rumors and confirmed reports surrounding the raven-haired beauty include:

• Jolie is reported to be estranged from her celebrity father and, in 2004, legally had the 'Voight' dropped from her name.
• Angelina has been rumored to have slept with many of the leading men in her movies and other celebrities, including Jonny Lee Miller (married to Jolie 1996-1999), Timothy Hutton, Nicholas Cage, Colin Farrel, Billy Bob Thornton (married to Jolie 2000-2003), Val Kilmer, and most recently to Brad Pitt. While her love life is her own business, she has been criticized by many for breaking up Pitt's marriage with Jennifer Aniston, although both she and Pitt have denied the connection.
• During her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton, she carried a vial of his blood on a chain around her neck.
• Jolie is rumored to be a collector of knives, many of which she enjoys using during sex play.
• While tattoos are nothing new in pop culture, Jolie's tattoos are highly publicized, plentiful, and evolving. Among her more than a dozen tattoos are:
  

  

  Jolie's tattoos
  • Billy Bob's name on her left arm was covered with the longitude and latitude where her oldest son was born.
  • A large tiger on her lower back.
  • The Chinese symbol for death on her upper back was covered with a pray for her son.
  • The letter 'H' is tattooed on the inside of her wrist.
  • A cross is on her abdomen.
• After she stated that she was "in love" with her brother at the 2000 Academy Awards, rumors ran rampant that she had an incestuous relationship with her sibling.

What's Up in 2006

As of the summer of 2006, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are still a couple. She gave birth to her first natural child, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (her first two children were legally adopted by Pitt in 2005). All indications are they are happy together.

Jolie Triva

• Angelina’s favorite pets are snakes and lizards.
• She has admitted to being bisexual.
• On her left forearm, Angelina has a tattoo of the Tennessee Williams quote, "A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages."
• Angelina’s ethnic background is Czechoslovakian, Native American, and French.

Commentary

Whether you are an Angelina fan or hater, you have to give her credit for giving back to the world around her and for honing her craft. She has won numerous awards for her performances and her demand as an actor is at an all-time high.