| Angelina Jolie is the only actress of her
generation who can thank her famous father for the lips that have become her
trademark. The actress was born Angelina Jolie Voight to the pillow-lipped Jon Voight and actress Marcheline
Bertrand on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles.
Raised mostly by her mother after her parents divorced while she was still a
baby, Jolie moved around a lot with her mother and brother. She also did a fair
amount of traveling as a professional model, living in such places as London,
New York, and Los Angeles before settling for a time in New York as a student at
the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and New York University, where she first
started acting in theater productions. The fledgling actress soon moved on to
film with a small role in 1993's Cyborg 2, followed in 1995 by her turn as a
computer hacker in the more widely seen Hackers. The film gave her her first taste
of recognition, as well as an introduction to Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller, to whom she was married
for a short time.
After appearing in a number of mediocre films, Jolie finally hit it big in
1997 with her Golden Globe-winning performance as George Wallace's wife in the highly
acclaimed TV movie George Wallace. The role, coupled with
her Emmy-nominated performance in the title role of HBO's Gia, provided Jolie with a new level of
professional respect and recognition. She was soon appearing on talk shows and
in magazines, answering questions about everything from her multiple tattoos to
her famous father to her brief marriage.
She was also netting roles in high-profile projects: In 1998 Jolie headlined
an ensemble cast that included Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Anthony Edwards, Gillian Anderson, Ryan Phillippe, and Madeline Stowe in Playing By Heart. The
following year, she was part of another high-voltage cast in Mike Newell's Pushing Tin, co-starring alongside John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. Although the film was
neither a critical nor a financial success, it did little to diminish the rapid
ascent of the career of the actress, who was in hot demand for projects that
would further elevate her already rising star. In 2000, Jolie's star received
one of its greatest boosts to date when the actress won an Academy Award for
Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a volatile mental patient in Girl, Interrupted. Later that year, her
personal life also got a boost in the form of her April marriage to Billy Bob Thornton.
Onscreen, Jolie was hard to miss in 2000. She starred in a number of films,
including the crime thriller Gone in Sixty Seconds, in which she
co-starred as a car thief alongside Nicolas Cage, and Original Sin, a thriller that featured
her as the bad-seed bride of a Cuban tycoon (Antonio Banderas). If she was hard to
miss in 2000, Jolie was impossible to escape in 2001 with her turn as shapely
video-game adventuress Lara Croft in the long anticipated film adaptation of the
popular Tomb Raider video-game franchise. Carrying on the tradition of
video-game movies that are light on plot but heavy on the action, Tomb Raider (2001) and Lara Croft Tomb
Raider: Cradle of Life (2003) scored with summer audiences and quickly shot to
number one at the box office despite disparaging reviews citing an incoherent
story line, unlike Life or Something Like It, the 2002 romantic comedy-drama
that critics and audiences alike would rather not have seen.
On July 18th, 2002, Jolie filed for divorce from Billy Bob Thornton, claiming that their
priorities no longer meshed after having adopted a child. Though the famously
quirky couple were no longer, Angelina's film schedule remained hectic. In 2003
she would play a rich-girl-turned-humanitarian in Beyond Borders, while 2004 saw
a host of parts for Jolie, including a role in Oliver Stone's Alexander, an epic
biography of Alexander the Great starring Colin Farrell, as well as a turn
alongside fellow Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow in Sky Captain: The World of
Tomorrow, and a role as a tough FBI agent in the thriller Taking Lives. Finally,
Jolie closed out the year by lending her voice to Dreamworks' animated kid-flick
Shark's Tale.
While the Jolie-starring Mr. and Mrs. Smith proved to be one of Summer 2005's
biggest money-makers, the actress's name was on the lips of gossip-mongers for
most of the year not for the film itself, but rather for Jolie's relationship
with costar Brad Pitt. Though rumors of an affair were long shirked and denied,
eventually the pari were scene regularly together in public and Pitt filed for
divorce from wife Jennifer Aniston. |
