Happy Birthday Angelina Jolie !

 

In addition to her film career, Jolie is noted for her humanitarian efforts, for which she has received a  Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and an honorary damehood of the Order of St Michael and St George (DCMG), among other honors. She promotes various causes, including conservation, education, and women’s rights, and is most noted for her advocacy on behalf of refugees as a  Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

As a public figure, Jolie has been cited as one of the most influential and powerful people in the American entertainment industry, as well as the world’s most beautiful woman, by various media outlets. Her personal life is the subject of wide publicity.

Divorced from actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton, she is now married to actor Brad Pitt. They have six children together, three of whom were adopted internationally. Following Jolie’s marriage to Pitt, she began using “Angelina Jolie Pitt” as her professional name.

“I am no different to anybody else,” she told Vogue when asked what her advice is to all the women who look up to her as a role model. “I wake up pressuring myself. Every day I try to be the best that I can be and I think that that is all we can ask of ourselves.”

“I think that we all have to support each other in this life. Women need to hold strong together and take care of each other. We shouldn’t compete with each other. We must love each other.”

While  no-one can seemingly compete with Jolie (we’re talking about a mother-of-six, actress, director, producer, UNHCR Special Envoy and  honorary dame, it’s still somewhat uplifting to hear these sentiments from her.

Angelina Jolie was born in Los Angeles, California, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon Voight

and Marcheline Bertrand.

She is the sister of actor James Haven and niece of singer-songwriter Chip Taylor. Her godparents are actors Jacqueline Bisset  and Maximilian Schell. 

Marcheline called herself ‘blessed’ for being given the opportunity share her life with such ‘beautiful human beings’ as her children.

On her father’s side, Jolie is of German and Slovak descent  and on her mother’s side, she is of primarily French-Canadian, Dutch, and German ancestry.  Like her mother, Jolie has stated that she is part Iroquois,  although her only known indigenous ancestors were 17th-century Hurons. 

After her parents’ separation in 1976, Jolie and her brother lived with their mother, who had abandoned her acting ambitions to focus on raising her children.  As a child, she often watched films with her mother and it was this, rather than her father’s successful career, that inspired her interest in acting,  though at age five she had a bit part in Voight’s Lookin’ to Get Out (1982). 

When Jolie was six years old, Bertrand and her live-in partner, filmmaker Bill Day, moved the family to Palisades, New York;  they returned to Los Angeles five years later. Jolie then 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.

Jolie first attended Beverly Hills High School, where she felt isolated among the children of some of the area’s affluent families, because her mother survived on a more modest income. She was teased by other students, who targeted her for being extremely thin and for wearing glasses and braces. Her early attempts at modeling, at her mother’s insistence, proved unsuccessful. She then transferred to Moreno High School, an alternative school, where she became a “punk outsider,”  wearing all-black clothing, going out moshing.  She dropped out of her acting classes and aspired to become a funeral director, taking at-home courses to study embalming.

At age 16, after the relationship had ended, Jolie graduated from high school and rented her own apartment, before returning to theater studies,   though in 2004 she referred to this period with the observation,

“I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos.”

As a teenager, Jolie found it difficult to emotionally connect with other people, and as a result she self-harmed,  later commenting, “For some reason, the ritual of having cut myself and feeling the pain, maybe feeling alive, feeling some kind of release, it was somehow therapeutic to me” .  She also struggled with insomnia and an eating disorders.

Angelina suffered episodes of depression and twice planned to commit suicide—at age 19 and again at 22, when she attempted to hire a hitman to kill her. When she was 24, she experienced a nervous breakdown and was admitted for 72 hours to UCLA Medical Center‘s psychiatric ward.

 Two years later, after adopting her first child, Jolie found stability in her life, later stating, “I knew once I committed to Maddox, I would never be self-destructive again.”

Angelina’s starring role as the video game heroine Lara Croft in  Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) established her as a leading Hollywood actress.

She continued her successful action-star career with Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Wanted(2008), and Salt (2010), and received critical acclaim for her performances in the dramas   A Mighty Heart (2007) and  Changeling (2008), which earned her a nomination for an   Academy Award for Best Actress. Beginning in the 2010s, she expanded her career by directing and producing the wartime dramas In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) and  Unbroken (2014). Her biggest commercial success came with the Disney fantasy Maleficent (2014).

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) made her an international superstar. An adaptation of the popular Tomb Raider videogames, the film required her to learn an English accent and undergo extensive martial arts training to play the archaeologist-adventurer Lara Croft. Although the film generated mostly negative reviews, Jolie was generally praised for her physical performance; Newsday‍ ’​s John Anderson commented, “Jolie makes the title character a virtual icon of female competence and coolth.”The film was an international hit, earning $274.7 million worldwide,  and launched her global reputation as a female action star.

“We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering. I honestly want to help. I don’t believe I feel differently from other people. I think we all want justice and equality, a chance for a life with meaning. All of us would like to believe that if we were in a bad situation someone would help us.”

Angelina Jolie first witnessed the effects of a humanitarian crisis while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) in war-torn Cambodia, an experience she later credited with having brought her a greater understanding of the world.  Upon her return home, she contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for information on international trouble spots.  To learn more about the conditions in these areas, she began visiting refugee camps around the world. In February 2001, she 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 following months, Jolie returned to Cambodia for two weeks and met with  Afghan refugees in Pakistan, where she donated $1 million in response to an international UNHCR emergency appeal,  the largest donation UNHCR had ever received from a private individual. 

She covered all costs related to her missions and shared the same rudimentary working and living conditions as UNHCR field staff on all of her visits.  Jolie was named a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva on August 27, 2001.

Over the next decade, she went on more than 40 field missions, meeting with refugees and internally displaced persons in over 30 countries. In 2002, when asked what she hoped to accomplish, she stated, “Awareness of the plight of these people.

I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon.”To that end, her 2001-02 field visits were chronicled in her book Notes from My Travels, which was published in October 2003 in conjunction with the release of her humanitarian drama Beyond Borders.

On April 17, 2012, after more than a decade of service as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie was promoted to the rank o fSpecial Envoy to High Commissioner António Guterres, the first to take on such a position within the organization. In her expanded role, she was given authority to represent Guterres and UNHCR at the diplomatic level, with a focus on major refugee crises. 

In the months following her promotion, she made her first visit as Special Envoy—her third over all—to Ecuador, where she met with Colombian refugees,  and she accompanied Guterres on a week-long tour of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, to assess the situation of refugees from neighboring Syria. Since then, Jolie has gone on a dozen field missions around the world to meet with refugees and undertake advocacy on their behalf.

She is an Amazing Woman !

Happy Birthday Angelina Jolie !