| BIOGRAPHY
Next to Liv Tyler, 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.
|
FILMOGRAPHY
• Alexander (2004)
• Shark Tale (2004)
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
• Taking Lives (2004)
• Beyond Borders (2003)
• Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)
• Life or Something Like It (2002)
• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
• Original Sin (2001)
• Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
• The Bone Collector (1999)
• Girl, Interrupted (1999)
• Hell's Kitchen (1999)
• Playing By Heart (1999)
• Pushing Tin (1999)
• Gia (1998)
• Hell's Kitchen (1998)
• George Wallace (1997)
• Playing God (1997)
• Foxfire (1996)
• Love Is All There Is (1996)
• Mojave Moon (1996)
• Hackers (1995)
• Without Evidence (1995)
• Cyborg 2 (1993) |
