Angelina Jolie (born
Angelina Jolie Voight on June 4, 1975) is an
Academy Award-winning
American actress, a former
fashion model, and a Goodwill
Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency. She is also known for her great beauty as well as her tumultuous off-screen life. She has received
three Golden Globes,
two Screen Actors Guild Awards and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Jolie has been married twice — to actors
Jonny Lee Miller and
Billy Bob Thornton — and she currently lives together with fellow actor Brad Pitt, a
relationship that sparked an unprecedented worldwide media frenzy. Jolie and Pitt have two adopted children,
Maddox and Zahara, and a biological child,
Shiloh. Since 2001 Jolie is well known for promoting humanitarian causes around the globe, most prominently for her work with refugees through UNHCR.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Jolie is the daughter of actors
Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is of Czech and English descent on her father's side, and French-Canadian and Iroquois on her mother's side.
After her parents' divorce in 1976, one-year-old Jolie and her older brother
James Haven were raised by their mother who had moved with them to New York. Her mother gave up her dream of becoming an actress to raise Jolie and her older brother. As a child Jolie collected snakes and lizards, she had a crush on Mr. Spock and went to the movies regularly with her mother; Jolie later explained this is how she got interested in acting, not from her father.
When Jolie was 11 the family moved back to Los Angeles. Now Jolie 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. As a student at Beverly Hills High School, she was not alone in her cinematic ambitions, but felt like an outsider in the midst of good-looking, pampered children who teased her for her odd looks and being painfully skinny, for wearing braces, glasses and second-hand clothes, since unlike the other parents, her mother was not rich.
Her confidence was further damaged when her initial attempts at modelling proved unsuccessful. As a result Jolie grew increasingly unhappy, felt worthless and started to cut herself; something she speaks openly about today, e.g. during an appearance on CNN, "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."
At 14, Jolie dropped out of her acting classes and dreamed of becoming a funeral director. She started a life of fast-living and active self-loathing, wore black, dyed her hair purple and went out moshing with her live-in boyfriend. Two years later, as the relationship had ended, she rented an apartment above a garage a few blocks from her mother's place. She went back to theatre and graduated high school, but even today Jolie likes to point out: "I am still at heart just a punk kid with tattoos".
Relationship with her Father
Jolie has been long estranged from her father — mainly because she blames his cheating on her mother for the break up of their family — though a reconciliation was attempted by his appearing with her in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. In July 2002 Jolie filed a request to legally change her name to "Angelina Jolie", dropping Voight as her last name; the name change was made official on September 12, 2002. In August of the same year Voight had claimed that his daughter has "serious emotional problems" on Access Hollywood. In the October 2004 issue of Premiere Magazine Jolie indicated that she was no longer interested in pursuing a relationswith her father, "My father and I don’t speak. I don’t hold any anger toward him. I don’t believe that somebody’s family becomes their blood. Because my son’s adopted, and families are earned." She stated that she did not want to publicize her reasons for not having a relationship with her father, but since she had judopted her son Maddox, that she did not think it was healthy for her to be around him. Voight has not met his grandchildren.