Angelina Jolie Voight or Angelina Jolie was born on June 4, 1975 in Los Angeles, California and is the daughter of famous Hollywood actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Jolie comes from a line of other famous celebrity relatives; she is the niece of Chip Taylor who happens to be the sister of James Haven and the god-daughter of Jacqueline Bisset and Maximillian Schell. After her parents separated in 1976, Jolie and her younger brother were raised by their mother who eventually gave up her Hollywood ambitions and relocated at Palisades, New York. As a young child, Jolie found interest in acting due to her father’s big influence and often went to watch movies with her mother. At age 11, the family went back to Los Angeles and there she pursued her dreams by attending the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute for two years and appeared in several stage productions.
Jolie attended secondary schooling at the Beverly Hills High School (now known as Moreno High School) where in her teenage years she struggled to cope with her feeling of isolation among the other children in the area’s most affluent families. Her mother survived living on a more modest income and she often wore second-hand clothes despite the pressures from her peers who were living the ultimate lifestyle of a rich kid growing in a posh neighborhood. She was often teased at school by other students due to her very distinctive features like being an extremely thin teenager who wore glasses and sported braces on her teeth. Jolie’s self-esteem sunk further down when she initially attempted to break into the world of modeling which was only proven unsuccessful that led her to cut herself when she adapted the taste for collecting knives as some sort of therapeutic remedy. At the age of 14 she had finally made it to the modeling world and was signed with Finesse Model Management where she made modeling stints in the United States and in Europe. During that time she made several music video appearances for such artists like Meat Loaf, Antonello Venditti, Lenny Kravitz and the Lemonheads.
Her professional movie career began in 1993 where she got to play her first leading role in the low-budgeted sci-fi flick Cyborg 2 as a near-human robot. In 1995, she starred in the movie Hackers playing the role of Kate “Acid Burn” Libby, this was Jolie’s launch pad into Hollywood where some of the film critics began to recognize her acting abilities as a budding actress. It was also in this movie where she met her first husband Jonny Lee Miller. Although the movie did not rake in the cash at the box-office, it had become a cult classic after the movie was released on video. In the 1996 comedy Love Is All There Is, she played the role of Gina Malacici in this loosely-based adaptation of Romeo and Juliet about two rival Italian family restaurant owners in New York. She later appeared in the movie Mojave Moon as a youngster named Eleonor Rigby and co-starred with Danny Aiello and Anne Archer. Also from that same year when Jolie landed a role for the movie Foxfire where the story evolved around her character as Margret “Legs” Sadovsky and other four girls who beats up their teacher after sexually harassing them. For the second time around, Jolie was praised for her outstanding performance. In 1997 she starred opposite X-Files star David Duchovny in the movie Playing God where she portrayed a surgeon finding herself dragged deeper into the criminal world after being stripped of her medical license.
Jolie got her first acting trophy from the Golden Globe Award along with an Emmy nomination for the biopic George Wallace for which she starred with Gary Sinese. 1998 saw a more brilliant actress in Jolie when she played the true-to-life role of supermodel Gia Carangi in HBO’s Gia. Her portrayal of the real life supermodel proved to be a fitting role for Jolie since the actress delivered the part so well that it was almost too good to be true which earned her once again for the second year a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy nomination. She also won her first Screen Actors Guild award for the same movie. She also did a movie with actor Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector where she played a police officer who reluctantly helps Washington track down a serial killer. The film made it big in the box-office and has earned over $151 million worldwide. Jolie took the supporting role of a sociopath named Lisa Rowe in Girl, Interrupted back in 1999 with fellow actress Winona Ryder. It was dubbed as Jolie’s return to Hollywood stardom after receiving numerous praises from film critics. She went on in doing the movie alongside Nicholas Cage in Gone In 60 Seconds who played the ex-girlfriend of car thief played by Cage. It became her highest grossing movie then that earned $237 million in the box office.
But what stamped Jolie to become an international superstar when she did Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in 2001. The movie was based on the popular videogame Tomb Raider. She was made to undergo extensive martial arts training and required to master the British accent for the movie. The movie did get negative reviews but the public praised the actress for her physical performance. Nonetheless, the movie earned a whopping $275 million internationally. In 2005, Jolie was to star alongside Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt for the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith which was well received as the public saw the perfect chemistry between the two actors on screen while rumors began to spread that the two were having something going on behind the cameras. The movie was one of the highest-grossing films of 2005 which earned $478 million worldwide. In 2007, Jolie was featured in the animated epic directed by Robert Zemeckis entitled Beowulf, playing the role of an enchanted seductress and mother to Grendel.
Jolie had just completed shooting for her upcoming movie Wanted as well as with DreamWorks animated movie KungFu Panda both scheduled to be released in the summer of 2008.