Is it her long legs, ample bee-stung lips or striking deep-set blue eyes? The daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand has become one of the most fascinating women on the face of the earth.
In order to truly understand the public's fascination with the sultry beauty we must understand who she is and where she comes from.
Abandoning her youthful aspirations to become a funeral director, Angelina Jolie began studying acting at age 11 and segued into show business as a professional model and actress in music videos.
Angelina graced the screen in "Cyborg II: Glass Shadows" (1993), a direct-to-video sci-fi action flick in which she played a heroic human-machine hybrid. Angelina garnered much more attention and better review in the cyber-thriller "Hackers" (1995).
More film work readily followed, initially in small-scale character-driven roles.
Saturation in the media ensued when she became the fifth wife of the equally eccentric and significantly older actor Billy Bob Thornton, a match clearly created for tabloid heaven, in May of 2000--the couple's constant declarations of love and erotic devotion to each other was topped only by the creepy revelation that they wore vials of one another's blood around their necks.
On-screen, Angelina continued portraying tough young women, but not until she became the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the titular, wildly popular, shorts-wearing video game action heroine "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" (2001) did she become a media darling.
Angelina Jolie's profile as movie star was raised to epic proportions when she co-starred with the hunky Brad Pitt in the Doug Liman-helmed action-fest "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (2005), in which the actors played a bored married couple surprised to realize that they are each secretly assassins, ultimately hired to snuff each other out.
It was from this point that the rumors quickly abounded that an on-set romance between Jolie and Pitt was a contributing factor to the demise of Pitt's marriage to actress Jennifer Aniston.
Away from the screen, Jolie's expressed a dedication and commitment to increasing awareness and aid to counties devastated by internal and external conflicts, disease and third world conditions.
In 2001, after she made several trips to the war-torn countries of Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Pakistan, Jolie was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
In 2002 she adopted a baby boy from a Cambodian orphanage whom she named Maddox, and in 2005 she adopted an infant daughter from an Ethiopian orphanage whom she named Zahara.
-- Compiled from hollywood.com
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