R.!.P: Finally Hollywood Reports Very Sad News About Angelina Jolie, She Is Confirmed As…See more

R.!.P: Finally Hollywood Reports Very Sad News About Angelina Jolie, She Is Confirmed As…See more

 

 

 

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Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie is an Academy Award-winning actor known for the movies Girl, Interrupted, Salt, and Maleficent.

 

By Biography.com Editors and Catherine CarusoUpdated: Oct 28, 2024 3:35 PM EDT

angelina jolie poses in beige gown at movie premierepinterest

Maria Moratti//Getty Images

1975-present

Who Is Angelina Jolie?

Quick Facts

Young Angelina Jolie

Movies

Directing Work

Marriages

Children

Humanitarian Efforts

Health Issues and Cancer Prevention

Net Worth

Quotes

Latest News: Angelina Jolie Portrays Opera Star Maria Callas in New Film

Angelina Jolie will portray Greek-American opera singer Maria Callas in the upcoming biopic Maria. The film debuted at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where it received an eight-minute standing ovation, which made the Oscar-winning actor weep tears of joy.

 

In an August interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jolie, 49, shared that learning opera for the role was a “scary” experience. “It took many months of singing classes. Months of just getting the singing down and then the Italian classes and then the voice and doing all these things like her,” she said. “My first class, I cried. I was sad, I was scared. It was a strange physical body reaction.”

 

However, it all started to click for Jolie once her instructor showed her how to breathe and sing in the right style. “That’s when I became really emotional,” Jolie continued. “It requires your whole heart, body and mind, opera.”

 

Maria arrives in select theaters on November 27 and will be available to stream on Netflix on December 11.

 

Who Is Angelina Jolie?

Oscar-winning actor Angelina Jolie is one of Hollywood’s marquee names since her rise to fame in the late 1990s. After years of consistent work, Jolie made her big break in the 1998 HBO television biopic Gia before starring in Girl, Interrupted the following year, for which she earned an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Since then, she has starred in movies like Wanted, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Salt and Changeling. She later had a huge international blockbuster with Disney’s Maleficent, which spawned a sequel. Jolie is also a skilled director, having directed the movies In the Land of Blood and Honey, Unbroken, and By the Sea, where she co-starred with then-husband Brad Pitt. She stars in the upcoming biopic Maria, which is set to be released in select theaters on November 27, 2024, before coming to Netflix.

 

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Angelina Jolie

BORN: June 4, 1975

BIRTHPLACE: Los Angeles, California

SPOUSE: Jonny Lee Miller (1995-1999), Billy Bob Thornton (2000-2003), and Brad Pitt (2014-2019)

CHILDREN: Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, Knox, and Vivienne

PARENTS: Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand

ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

 

Young Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, to Hollywood actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Her parents separated when she was a toddler and later divorced in 1980. After the split, Jolie and her brother, James, were primarily raised by their mother, who gave up her acting career to care for them. Her father was largely absent from her life, seeing her only on birthdays and holidays. She spent much of her childhood in Palisades, New York, before moving back to Los Angeles when she was 11. Jolie began acting at a young age following her parents’ footsteps, playing a small role in her father’s 1982 film Lookin’ to Get Out. As a teenager, she took acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute and tried modeling. Jolie attended Beverly Hills High School for a time before transferring to nearby Moreno High School after facing severe bullying. During this time, she went through what she called a rebellious “punk outsider” phase, during which she struggled with her mental health.

 

At age 14, Jolie started dating her first boyfriend, who lived with her in her family home for two years. “I was either going to be reckless on the streets with my boyfriend, or he was going to be with me in my bedroom with my mom in the next room because I was going to have a boyfriend,” she told Cosmopolitan in August 2003. After turning 16, Jolie ended the relationship and graduated from high school early to pursue her acting dreams. It was then that she moved out of her mother’s house and rented her an apartment. As a young actor, Jolie went by her middle name due to her strained relationship with her father. She eventually made it official, legally changing her surname in 2002. “I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father,” she said. “After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father.”

 

Movies

At the start of her career, Jolie was cast in several music videos for artists like Lenny Kravitz and Meat Loaf and appeared in the B movie Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow. In 1995, she scored a lead role in her first major studio film, Hackers, playing a teenage hacker, and later starred in the thriller Without Evidence. The following year, Jolie appeared in four movies, including the independent queer film Foxfire. In 1997, she starred in the two-part television series George Wallace, which was about the segregationist Alabama governor of the same name. Jolie played his wife, Cornelia, for which she received her first Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries. She was also nominated for an Emmy in the same category.

 

Golden Globe for Gia

On her way to becoming a popular actor, Jolie gave a star-making performance in the 1998 HBO film Gia, based on the short, tragic life of fashion model Gia Marie Carangi. She gained wide recognition for her portrayal of the title character, a part she almost didn’t accept due to concerns that the script would not handle the film’s heavy themes correctly. Finding reassurance, the method actor committed to the role, even staying in character between scenes and off set.

 

After filming wrapped, however, Jolie briefly gave up acting, moving to New York to study directing and screenwriting at NYU. “I felt like I’d exposed so much, and I felt quite vulnerable after it,” she told ABC News in 1999. “I just didn’t know if I had much more to offer.” In the end, Jolie’s dedication and acting chops in Gia earned her a Golden Globe win for Best Actress and an Emmy nod. These acknowledgments and the film’s reception made her reconsider her decision to abandon acting, and she was soon cast in a career-changing role.

 

Oscar Win for Girl, Interrupted

angelina jolie holding her oscar

Michael Crabtree – PA Images//Getty Images

Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2000 for her performance in Girl, Interrupted.

Jolie’s rapid ascent continued with the 1999 drama Girl, Interrupted, which follows a group of teenagers in a 1960s psychiatric hospital. Starring alongside Winona Ryder, the actor played the rebellious Lisa Rowe, who is diagnosed as a sociopath after years of being institutionalized. Jolie won her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance and nabbed another Golden Globe in the same category. “To be honest, there’s a lot of Lisa in me,” she said then. “I certainly have been told a lot of times that I’m dark or that people think I’m crazy. I didn’t think that Lisa was insane, that she deserved to be locked up.”

 

Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft

In the new millennium, Jolie continued to take on various interesting roles. She portrayed adventurer Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider films, for which she gained mainstream recognition. While 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was not well-received by critics and fans, the actor was praised for her overall performance. Jolie reprised her role in the 2003 sequel, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider—The Cradle of Life, which didn’t perform as well at the box office as the first film. Between these films, she starred in the 2001 romantic thriller Original Sin opposite Antonio Banderas, which follows a wealthy Cuban man who marries an American mail-order bride.

 

The following year, Jolie played a Seattle TV reporter interviewing a psychic homeless man in Life or Something Like It. Jolie also appeared in the poorly received 2003 film Beyond Borders, portraying a socialite who joins a doctor to help war-torn nations. In 2004, she played an FBI profiler in Taking Lives and a squadron commander in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

In 2005, Jolie teamed up with Brad Pitt to play married assassins in the sexy action flick Mr. and Mrs. Smith. In the box office hit, she portrayed one half of a bored married couple who unexpectedly find out they both have secret identities as assassins. Jolie and Pitt were praised for their performances and undeniable onscreen chemistry, which they downplayed at the time. The following year, Jolie played a neglected, troubled socialite wife in The Good Shepherd before taking on the role of a vengeful, monstrous mother in the 2007 adaptation of Beowulf. That same year, she also performed brilliantly as Mariane Pearl, the pregnant widow of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, in A Mighty Heart. The film was based on Mariane’s account of her husband’s abduction and murder.

 

Oscar Nod for Changeling

angelina jolie poses with brad pitt at movie premiere

Stephane Cardinale – Corbis//Getty Images

Angelina Jolie earned an Oscar nomination in 2009 for her performance in Changeling.

In 2008, Jolie joined the voice cast of the animated comedy Kung Fu Panda as Master Tigress, a role she later reprised for multiple sequels, and portrayed another assassin in the action thriller Wanted. That year, she starred in the Clint Eastwood-directed thriller Changeling as a mother who investigates her son’s unusual disappearance and reappearance in the 1920s. The film is based on the story of missing child star Walter Collins. While she initially thought the role was too upsetting, Jolie couldn’t stop thinking about the script and the real woman behind it.

 

“I found it very inspiring and really wanted people to know about her and felt like it was an extra piece of justice,” she told IndieLondon at the time. “But as a mom, it was horrible.” Jolie’s performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Leading Actress. She earned the lead role in the action-packed Salt in 2010, about a CIA agent, Evelyn Salt, who is on the run after being accused of being a Russian spy. That same year, she played the mysterious Elise Clifton-Ward in the espionage flick The Tourist alongside Johnny Depp.

 

Maleficent and Sequel

In 2014, the actor enjoyed the rewards of shaping a major blockbuster, starring in and executive producing Disney’s Maleficent. Jolie portrayed the sorceress title character, with the film taking on a woman-centered revisionist approach to the main villain from the animated 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty. Her daughter, Vivienne, also appeared in the movie, playing a younger version of Princess Aurora. With U.S. critics divided on the merits of Maleficent, the project nonetheless worked box office magic, earning around $240 million domestically and an additional $517 million abroad. The sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, hit theaters in October 2019, grossing nearly $500 million worldwide.

 

Maria and Other Recent Roles

In 2020, Jolie played the mother of Alice and Peter in the fantasy drama Come Away, based on Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The following year, she portrayed a wildland firefighter trying to save a teenage murder witness from assassins in Those Who Wish Me Dead. Jolie also starred in the Marvel film Eternals as Thena, an immortal being with superpowers. Her newest movie, Maria, arrives in theaters in late November 2024. The biopic stars Jolie as the late opera singer Maria Callas.

 

Directing Work

Amidst her acting career, Jolie also began honing her craft as a director. She made her feature-length directorial debut with 2011’s In the Land of Blood and Honey, looking at a relationship damaged by the Bosnian War. This was followed by 2014’s Unbroken, a biopic that told the story of Olympian Louis Zamperini’s survival in a Japanese POW camp. The film was based on the bestselling Laura Hillenbrand book of the same name and earned more than $163 million worldwide.

 

In 2016, Jolie directed and starred in the art film By the Sea, a slowly-paced Mediterranean tale set in the 1970s about a married couple and the tensions of their relationship. The following year, she focused strictly on directing First They Killed My Father, based on a Cambodian activist’s memoir of being trained as a child soldier. More recently, Jolie wrote and directed the 2024 war drama Without Blood, based on the Alessandro Baricco book of the same title. The film stars Salma Hayek and follows two strangers recounting their memories of an unnamed war.

 

Marriages

angelina jolie and brad pitt pose together

Michael Kovac//Getty Images

Angelina Jolie married actor Brad Pitt in August 2014.

Famous for her off-screen romances, Jolie has been married three times. She married Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller in March 1996 in a civil ceremony attended only by her mother and Miller’s best friend. The couple separated a year later, finalizing their divorce in 1999. Shortly after, Jolie married Academy Award-winning actor Billy Bob Thornton, who she met on the set of Pushing Tin. They got married in secret during a trip to Las Vegas in 2000. Thornton was still engaged to actor Laura Dern at the time. The couple made headlines when they appeared in public wearing necklaces filled with each other’s blood. Jolie and Thornton’s union lasted two years before they separated in 2002 and divorced the following year.

 

Jolie met Brad Pitt during the making of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 2004. At the time, Pitt was married to Friends star Jennifer Aniston, and his affair with Jolie prompted their divorce, resulting in a Hollywood scandal that dominated tabloids for years. Referred to as “Brangelina,” Jolie and Pitt became one of the most sought-after Hollywood couples. The relationship moved fast, with Pitt filing paperwork to adopt Jolie’s two kids, Maddox and Zahara, in 2005. Over the next three years, the couple added four more children: Shiloh, Pax, Knox, and Vivienne. After dating for seven years, Pitt and Jolie got engaged in 2012. Slipping under the paparazzi radar, they quietly tied the knot in a private ceremony surrounded by their family and friends on August 23, 2014, in France. Their union as a married couple, however, did not last long.

 

Split from Brad Pitt

In September 2016, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt and requested sole physical custody of their six children, sparking another tabloid frenzy. Their contentious custody battle played out publicly with allegations that Pitt, after drinking on their private plane, had gotten “verbally abusive” and “physical” with Maddox. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services and the FBI launched an investigation but found no signs of abuse; the couple followed with a joint statement that they were working together to resolve their divorce.

 

Jolie opened up about their separation in a September 2017 cover story in Vanity Fair. In the interview, she said that by the summer of 2016, “things had become difficult” in their marriage, but she had defended their life together. “[Our lifestyle] was not in any way a negative,” she told the magazine. “That was not the problem. That is and will remain one of the wonderful opportunities we are able to give our children. … They’re six very strong-minded, thoughtful, worldly individuals. I’m very proud of them.”

 

In March 2018, Entertainment Tonight reported that the actress and humanitarian was quietly dating a “handsome, older-looking man who is a real estate agent,“ though the relationship was not considered serious by that point.

 

A few months later, it was revealed that Jolie was in danger of losing primary custody of her six children after preventing them from seeing Pitt during their ongoing divorce. According to court documents, the judge in their case declared the kids’ lack of a healthy relationship with their father “harmful” and threatened to award Pitt primary custody if things didn’t change. The judge suggested some steps the estranged couple could take, including providing Pitt with the cell phone number of each child, and outlined a summer visitation schedule to follow with Jolie in London to film Maleficent 2.

 

In August 2018, Jolie’s legal team filed court documents that claimed her estranged husband had “paid no meaningful child support since separation,” an accusation that Pitt’s side disputed. The following year, a judge ruled that Jolie and Pitt were legally single, but their divorce has yet to be finalized.

 

In October 2022, Jolie filed a complaint alleging that Pitt was physically abusive to her and their six children during a 2016 plane ride, leading to their divorce. She said he “choked one of the children and struck another in the face” and grabbed her “by the head and shook her.” Jolie also alleged that Pitt poured alcohol all over her and the kids. Two years later, in April 2024, she issued a new legal filing claiming that Pitt’s abuse against her and the children began long before the 2016 incident.

 

Children

angelina jolie smiles with five of her children

Mike Marsland//Getty Images

Angelina Jolie with five of her six children — Shiloh, Zahara, Vivienne, Maddox, and Knox.

Jolie is a mother to six adopted and biological children, whom she shares with her ex-husband, Brad Pitt. From oldest to youngest, they are Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox, and Vivienne. In 2002, Jolie adopted her son from Cambodia and named him Maddox. Three years later, she adopted a daughter, Zahara, from Ethiopia. Pitt adopted both children in 2005. The couple’s first biological daughter, Shiloh, was born in Namibia in 2006. The following year, Jolie added a new member to her family. She adopted a 3-year-old boy from a Vietnamese orphanage and named him Pax Thien. She then gave birth to fraternal twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, in July 2008 in a seaside hospital in southern France.

 

Following her split from Pitt, Jolie sought sole custody of their six children but was only awarded joint custody in May 2021. However, this decision was overturned in October 2022 due to a legal technicality. Amid the ongoing divorce, three of Jolie’s children—Zahara, Shiloh, and Vivienne—have chosen to adopt her last name.

 

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Humanitarian Efforts

A devoted humanitarian, Jolie was made a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency in 2001. She has since made headlines for her work to obtain aid for refugees in countries like Cambodia, Tanzania, Pakistan, Darfur, and Jordan. In 2005, Jolie received the Global Humanitarian Action Award from the United Nations Association of the USA for her activism on behalf of refugee rights. In the following years, she continued to draw attention to global issues and was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 2014 Governors Awards hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In December 2022, Jolie resigned from her UN ambassadorship but vowed to continue to advocate for refugees and other humanitarian issues. Two years later, in September 2024, she met with refugees displaced by the conflict in Sudan and urged the UN to “scale up the humanitarian response” in the country.

 

Health Issues and Cancer Prevention

Jolie experienced a tremendous personal loss in early 2