Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie was born on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California. Her parents were actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute as a teenager and later trained at New York University. Her screen career began in childhood with a small role in her father’s film Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), but she established herself as an adult actor with a series of performances in the 1990s.

Jolie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Lisa Rowe in Girl, Interrupted (1999), a drama set in a psychiatric hospital. The role followed her Golden Globe-winning performance as Gia Carangi in the television film Gia (1998), about the Philadelphia-born fashion model whose career was shaped by drug use and AIDS. In 2000, Jolie married actor Billy Bob Thornton; they divorced in 2003.

Her action-film work includes Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), in which she played the archaeologist and adventurer from the video-game series. She later appeared in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Wanted (2008), Salt (2010), and The Tourist (2010). In 2014, she played Maleficent in Disney’s live-action reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, returning to the role in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019). Her other dramatic roles include Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart (2007) and Christine Collins in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Jolie has also worked as a director and screenwriter. Her directorial projects include In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), a drama set during the Bosnian War, and Unbroken (2014), based on Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of Olympic runner and Second World War prisoner of war Louis Zamperini. She co-wrote and directed First They Killed My Father (2017), adapting Cambodian author Loung Ung’s memoir about surviving the Khmer Rouge regime.

Her public work has included humanitarian advocacy. Jolie served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 2001 and became a Special Envoy in 2012, undertaking field missions and speaking about refugees and displacement. She has described her double mastectomy in a 2013 New York Times article, explaining that she carried a BRCA1 gene mutation associated with elevated breast-cancer risk.

Jolie and Brad Pitt, whom she met while filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith, married in 2014 and separated in 2016. They have six children, three of whom were adopted.