Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie.

Name: Angelina Jolie
Born: 4 June 1975 (Age: 38)
Where: Los Angeles, California, USA
Height: 5' 7"
Awards: Won 1 Oscar and 3 Golden Globes, nominated for 1 BAFTA

While most Hollywood stars do everything they can to appear cool, professional and squeaky-clean, diligently concealing all their nasty little secrets, Angelina Jolie appears wholly unconcerned by controversy. Ever-keen to talk about her breakdowns, her disorders, her fantasies and her world-famous penchant for S&M, many would say she's built a career on titillating public confession. But she's also an increasingly fine and award-winning performer, her Oscar for Girl, Interrupted being only the first in a string of prestigious honours. Onscreen, as in bed, she is a risk-taker, and perhaps deserves to be seen as the spiritual sister of such greats as Streep, Pfeiffer and Lange. Beyond this, her international efforts on behalf of children and refugees have made her the most public-minded superstar since Audrey Hepburn.

She was born Angelina Jolie Voight in Los Angeles, on June 4th, 1975 - her name meaning Pretty Little Angel. Her father, Jon, was already an established superstar, having topped the bill in such classics as Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance. When Angelina was 2, he'd scoop the Best Actor Oscar for Coming Home. By then though, he'd already split from her mother, the part-Iroquois actress and model Marcheline Bertrand (now Angelina'smanager), who'd moved with Angelina and her brother James to the East Coast - to the Palisades, New York, to be more precise. 

Living here, Jolie was a happy child. She collected snakes and lizards - her favourite lizard being named Vladimir, and her favourite snake Harry Dean Stanton - and, oddly, like many females of her age, she had a major crush on Mr Spock. She would wear glittery clothing, including sparkly underwear, and flounce around, already performing, keen to make people laugh, to make them like her. She was a member of the Kissy Girls, who hunted boys down and kiss them till they screamed - until the school was forced to call the parents and the gang broke up. Marcheline would take the kids to the movies often, and Jolie claims this is where she got the notion to be an actress - not from her uncle, Chip Taylor (an actor and composer), not from her godmother Jacqueline Bisset, and definitely NOT from her father, though at age 7 she did appear in Lookin' To Get Out, a movie about inveterate gamblers, co-written by and starring Jon Voight. 

When Jolie was 11, her mother moved the family back to Los Angeles. They had already moved often, making the young girl feel constantly uprooted "I always dreamed", she says "of having an attic of things that I could go back up and look at".

Now Angelina decided she wanted to act and, as ever jumping in at the deep end, enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she trained for two years, appearing in several stage productions. As a pupil at Beverly Hills High School, she was not alone in her cinematic ambitions. But she certainly FELT alone in the midst of all those good-looking, pampered children, children who teased her mercilessly for wearing braces and glasses and being so painfully skinny. Unlike the other parents, Marcheline was not rich - so Angelina also had to seek her clothes at thrift stores like Aardvark. Her confidence received a further battering when her attempts at modelling proved fruitless. She never got picked - too short, too thin, too fat, too scarred.

. Scarred - yes. Perhaps it was the many moves, maybe it was to do with her father, a lonely, detached figure who did not want to live with his family (Angelina always feared she would be like that herself). Maybe it was the relative poverty, or the taunting, or the way she felt that -with her big eyes, big lips, big everything - she looked like a muppet. But Angelina had come to hate herself, to feel absolutely worthless. She felt unworthy, didn't like to be touched (she still has this problem sometimes). So, like too many young girls, she started to cut herself. At 14, she dropped out of acting classes and began an existence of fast-living and active self-loathing. She wore black, dyed her hair purple and went out slam-dancing with her live-in punk boyfriend. They experimented heavily in S&M, Angelina once asking him to draw a blade along her jawline (the scar is now faint, but still there). 

At 16, her relationship ended. She moved to an apartment opposite her mother and went back to theatre. Now committed to acting, her first role was, unsurprisingly, as a German dominatrix. She began to learn from her father, noticed how he would watch people, talk to them, become like them. She stopped fighting with him so much too, realising that they were both "drama queens". For his part, Voight noticed her talent, being moved to tears by her reading of the part of Catherine in A View From The Bridge. 

With the braces and glasses gone, she became a model too, working in Los Angeles, New York and London. She also appeared in the video for Meat Loaf's Rock'n'Roll Dreams Come Through - she'd later turn up in promos for Lenny Kravitz, Lemonheads and The Rolling Stones. Her confidence rose, though it would often plummet back down. She tells a story of how once she was so down she actually tried to hire a man to kill her. Being a compassionate sort of assassin, he told her to think about it for a month. Obviously, she didn't call him back.

Jolie had appeared in five of her brother's student films, made while he attended the USC School of Cinema (he was now known as James Haven), but her movie career proper began in 1993, when she starred as Casella "Cash" Reese, alongside Elias Koteas and Jack Palance in Cyborg 2.

Here, a near-human robot-thing, she was designed to seduce her way into the HQ of her creators' rivals and blow up. Already, her sexual charisma had been noted. Next came Hackers, where she met her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller, then riding high after his performance as Sick Boy in Trainspotting. Miller played a computer whizz-kid on the wrong side of the law, trying to save the world from a swine intent upon unleashing a vicious virus, while being pursued by the Secret Service. Jolie was Acid Burn, one of his team. 

The pair fell for each other big-time and were married, Jolie possibly looking for some kind of stability in her life. Now began her explicit openness in the press, as she told lurid tales of their sexual exploits. "You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens", she said jokingly. It was also announced that, when getting married, Jolie had worn black leather pants and a white shirt with Miller's name scrawled across the back in her own blood (well, who else's blood would she use?). In interviews, Jolie explained that her interest in blood and death was of long standing. She not only collected knives, she said, but had a fascination with mortuary science and, as a child, had dreamed of becoming a funeral director. Less Maude than Harold, then.

Now the roles started coming fast and thick. Jolie starred withDavid Duchovny in the nasty, stylish thriller Playing God (she'd later date her other co-star, Timothy Hutton). Then, in the road-movie Mojave Moon, she was a youngster, named Eleanor Rigby, who falls for Danny Aiello, while he takes a shine to her mother, Anne Archer. In Foxfire, she was one of a group of teenage girls who kill a teacher who harasses them, then gradually go wholly out-of-control. Directed by Annette Haywood-Carter, this was very much a girl-thing, as was Jolie's next release, the TV movie True Women, a Herstorical romantic drama set in the West, based on the book by Janice Woods Windle.

As a child, Jolie had always been encouraged to express her feelings, and now it really began to work for her. In biopic George Wallace, she played the wife of the segregationist Governor of Alabama who was shot and paralysed while running for President. This starred Gary Sinise and was directed by John Frankenheimer, but she more than held her own, picking up a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination. Next came Gia, another biopic, this time of Gia Carangi, a lesbian supermodel from the Seventies. This was crammed with sex, drugs and fearsome emotional drama, as Carangi crashed, burned and was eventually taken by AIDS. For the second consecutive year, Jolie won a Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Emmy. At the Golden Globes, by way of celebration, she jumped into a swimming-pool, clad in a hand-beaded Randolph Duke gown.

Alongside the Japanese sign for death, Billy Bob, H, two Native American symbols, a dragon and a black cross, she has marked on her body a Tennessee Williams line "A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages", and "Quod me nutrit me destruit" - What nourishes me also destroys me. Let's hope she continues to benefit from the nourishment. And the cage.