Born in Los Angeles, California, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Jolie is the niece of Chip Taylor, sister of James Haven and the god-daughter of Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell.
After her parents' separation in 1976, Jolie and her brother were raised by their mother, who abandoned her acting ambitions and moved with them to Palisades, New York. When she was 11, the family moved back to Los Angeles and 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. She later recalled her time as a student at Beverly Hills High School (later Moreno High School), and her feeling of isolation among the children of some of the area's more affluent families. Jolie's mother survived on a more modest income, and Jolie often wore second-hand clothes.
Jolie began working as a fashion model at 14. She was signed with Finesse Model Management and modeled in both the United States and Europe, working mainly in Los Angeles, New York and London. At that time she also appeared in numerous music videos.
Jolie appeared in five of her brother's student films, made while he attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts, but her professional movie career began in 1993, when she played her first leading role in the low budget film Cyborg 2, as Casella "Cash" Reese, a near-human robot, designed to seduce her way into a rival manufacturer's headquarters and then self-detonate.
Jolie first became personally aware of worldwide humanitarian crises while filming Tomb Raider in poverty-stricken and widely mined Cambodia. She eventually turned to UNHCR for more information on international trouble spots. In the following months she agreed to visit different refugee camps around the world to learn more about the situation and the conditions in these areas. In February 2001, Jolie went on her first field visit, an 18-day mission to Sierra Leone and Tanzania; she later expressed her shock at what she had witnessed. In the coming months she returned to Cambodia for two weeks and later met with Afghan refugees in Pakistan where she donated $1 million for Afghan refugees in response to an international UNHCR emergency appeal. Impressed by her interest and devotion in the subject, UNHCR named her a Goodwill Ambassador on August 27, 2001 at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva.
On March 28, 1996, Jolie married British actor Jonny Lee Miller, her co-star in the film Hackers. She attended her wedding in black leather pants and a white shirt, upon which she had written the groom's name in her blood. olie and Miller separated the following year and subsequently divorced on February 3, 1999.
She then married American actor Billy Bob Thornton, whom she had met on the set of Pushing Tin, on May 5, 2000. As a result of their frequent public declarations of passion and gestures of love (most famously wearing one another's blood in vials around their necks), their relationship became a favorite topic of the entertainment media. Jolie and Thornton divorced on May 27, 2003.
Jolie has said in interviews that she is bisexual and has long acknowledged that she had a sexual relationship with her Foxfire co-star Jenny Shimizu.
In early 2005, Jolie was involved in a well-publicized Hollywood scandal when she was accused of being the "other woman" in the divorce of actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. While Jolie and Pitt never publicly commented on the nature of their relationship, speculations continued throughout 2005. On January 11, 2006 Jolie confirmed to People that she was pregnant with Pitt's child and thereby confirmed their relationship for the first time in public.
On March 10, 2002, Jolie adopted her first child, seven-month-old Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt. Jolie adopted a six-month-old girl from Ethiopia, Zahara Marley Jolie-Pitt, on July 6, 2005. On May 27, 2006, Jolie gave birth to a daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, in Swakopmund, Namibia by a scheduled caesarean section. Pitt confirmed that their newly-born daughter will have a Namibian passport, and Jolie decided to offer the first pictures of Shiloh through the distributor Getty Images herself, rather than allowing paparazzi to make these extremely valuable snapshots. On March 15, 2007, Jolie adopted a three-year-old boy from Vietnam, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt , who was born on November 29, 2003 and abandoned at birth at a local hospital, where he was initially named Pham Quang Sang. |
