Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actor Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand. Her parents divorced when she was two, and she was raised primarily by her mother, developing a complicated relationship with her father that she has described in various public statements over the years. She attended Beverly Hills High School and began her professional training at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute from age eleven, alongside a teenage period she has described as rebellious and emotionally difficult — she considered becoming a mortician and engaged in self-harming behavior that she has discussed publicly in later years as an expression of disconnection and emotional turbulence. She began modeling at 14 and made her feature film debut at 16.
Angelina Jolie's breakthrough performances came through a series of edgy, psychologically demanding roles in the late 1990s: Gia (1998, a TV biopic of model Gia Carangi that earned her a Golden Globe) and Girl, Interrupted (1999, in which she played Lisa Rowe, a charismatic sociopath in a psychiatric institution, alongside Winona Ryder), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. These performances established her as someone willing to inhabit dark, unpleasant psychological territory with complete commitment and no vanity — qualities that have defined her best work throughout her career. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) made her one of the first female action stars of the blockbuster era.
Jolie's marriage to Brad Pitt — whom she met during the filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) — was one of the most scrutinized celebrity relationships of the 21st century, partly because their relationship began while Pitt was still married to Jennifer Aniston. Together they adopted three children — Maddox (from Cambodia, 2002), Zahara (from Ethiopia, 2005), and Pax (from Vietnam, 2007) — and had three biological children — Shiloh (2006) and twins Knox and Vivienne (2008). Their separation in 2016 and subsequent legal proceedings over custody and the ownership of their French winery have generated extensive litigation that was ongoing as of 2025. She has raised her six children with a degree of genuine global engagement — they have lived in Cambodia, France, England, and various other locations as her work required.
Angelina Jolie's humanitarian work — she has been a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador since 2001 and a Special Envoy since 2012, conducting over 60 field missions to refugee situations worldwide — is substantive and sustained, involving genuine personal presence in difficult and dangerous environments. Her 2013 New York Times op-ed disclosing her preventive double mastectomy after testing positive for the BRCA1 genetic mutation — which significantly elevated her breast and ovarian cancer risk — was one of the most significant public health communications of the decade, generating what researchers called 'the Angelina effect': a dramatic increase in genetic testing for breast cancer risk in the months following publication. She directed four films including Unbroken (2014), By the Sea (2015), First They Killed My Father (2017), and Without Blood (announced for 2025).
