Angelina Jolie was born Angelina Jolie Voight on 4 June 1975 in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actor Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand. Her parents separated before her first birthday, and she was raised largely by her mother between Los Angeles and Palisades, New York, with her father remaining a public, and at times publicly strained, presence in her life. She made her screen debut at the age of seven in a brief, uncredited appearance in her father’s 1982 film “Lookin’ to Get Out”, though she has said acting did not become a serious ambition until her teenage years. Biography.com traces her family background and early years in detail.

As a teenager Jolie trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York and took a handful of modelling assignments, though her mother reportedly discouraged her from pursuing modelling as a full-time path. She has spoken candidly about a difficult adolescence, including a brief, early marriage to actor Jonny Lee Miller in 1996, experiences she has since credited with shaping the more grounded outlook she brought to her later career and humanitarian work.

Jolie’s professional acting career began in 1993 with a lead role in the direct-to-video science-fiction sequel “Cyborg 2”, a modest project that nonetheless gave her a first credited film role and some early industry visibility. She spent the mid-1990s taking small parts in low-budget and independent productions while continuing to study acting, gradually building the credibility that would carry her into higher-profile studio work by the end of the decade.

Her breakthrough into mainstream recognition came with the 1995 thriller “Hackers”, in which she played computer hacker Kate Libby opposite Jonny Lee Miller, the co-star she would briefly marry the following year. The film performed modestly at the box office but built her a cult following and marked the point at which casting directors began to see her as a leading-woman prospect rather than a supporting player, a period documented on her IMDb biography page.

Jolie’s decisive breakthrough arrived with “Girl, Interrupted” (1999), the psychiatric-drama adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, in which she played the volatile patient Lisa Rowe opposite Winona Ryder. The performance earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 72nd Academy Awards in March 2000, along with a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the same role, instantly establishing her as one of Hollywood’s most formidable young dramatic actresses. Her Golden Globe history, including this win, is catalogued by the Golden Globes.

The recognition transformed her career trajectory, moving her from supporting and character roles into leading parts within only a few years. She followed the Oscar win with the title role in “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” (2001), a big-budget video-game adaptation that, despite mixed reviews, proved she could open a major action franchise and cemented her transition from acclaimed dramatic actress to bankable studio star.

Jolie went on to build one of the most commercially significant careers of any actress of her generation, anchoring franchises including “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (2005), in which she starred opposite Brad Pitt, “Wanted” (2008), “Salt” (2010) and Disney’s “Maleficent” (2014) and its 2019 sequel, in which her performance as the titular villain-turned-heroine became one of her signature roles. She also joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2021, playing the warrior Thena in “Eternals”, extending a franchise career that has spanned more than two decades and several studios.

By the early 2010s her earning power had become a talking point in its own right: in 2013 Forbes named her Hollywood’s highest-paid actress, with earnings estimated at $33 million over the preceding twelve months, a ranking reported in detail by Variety. The figure reflected both her box-office draw and a run of major studio paydays that placed her consistently among the small handful of actresses able to command lead-role fees on a par with the industry’s top actors.

Jolie’s public standing extends well beyond box-office rankings. In June 2014 she was appointed an Honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George by Queen Elizabeth II, becoming the first American woman to receive the honour, in recognition of her work against sexual violence in conflict zones and her contribution to British foreign policy; she formally received the insignia from the Queen at Buckingham Palace later that year, as reported by NBC News.

She has also been honoured by her own industry, receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018 and appearing repeatedly on lists of the world’s most influential and admired women compiled by major news and business outlets. Her public profile now rests as much on her humanitarian record as on her filmography, a rare combination for an actress of her box-office standing.

Jolie has been selective with commercial endorsements relative to her fame, favouring a small number of high-profile, long-running partnerships over broad multi-category deals. She has served for close to two decades as the face of Guerlain’s “Mon Guerlain” perfume, one of the longest-running celebrity fragrance partnerships in the beauty industry, lending her image to a campaign built around the idea of a modern, independent woman.

In 2011 she fronted Louis Vuitton’s “Core Values” campaign, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province, a location chosen for its personal significance as the place where she filmed “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and later worked as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador; she donated her fee from the campaign to charity, as detailed by PurseBlog.

Beyond acting, Jolie is also an established filmmaker, having written and directed several features rather than simply appearing in front of the camera. Her directorial credits include “In the Land of Blood and Honey” (2011), “Unbroken” (2014), “By the Sea” (2015), in which she also starred alongside Brad Pitt, and “First They Killed My Father” (2017), a Cambodian-language drama drawn from her long-standing connection to the country through her humanitarian work and her eldest son, Maddox.

In 2023 she moved into fashion with the launch of Atelier Jolie, a New York-based creative collective built around sustainable, made-to-order clothing and collaborations with independent tailors and artisans, including apprenticeship positions for refugees. The venture opened its first physical location on Great Jones Street in Manhattan that December, marking her first significant business venture outside filmmaking, as reported by Euronews.

Jolie’s best-known property is Chateau Miraval, a roughly 1,200-acre estate and vineyard in Correns, in the Provence region of France, which she and then-husband Brad Pitt leased from 2008 before buying outright in 2011 for a reported $28.4 million; the couple married there in 2014. The estate, which dates back to the seventeenth century and includes olive groves, private lakes and a working winery, is documented in detail on its dedicated Wikipedia page.

Following the couple’s 2016 separation, ownership of Miraval became one of the most contentious elements of their prolonged legal dispute, addressed separately below. Beyond Miraval, Jolie has held property tied closely to her humanitarian work, including land in Cambodia’s Battambang Province acquired in the early 2000s, reflecting a pattern of asset ownership shaped as much by personal and philanthropic ties as by conventional investment strategy.