Jolie began formally studying acting at the renowned Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in New York City at age 11. Five years later, she began living on her own, working as a professional model and appearing in music videos for artists including the Rolling Stones, Lenny Kravitz, Meat Loaf, and the Lemonheads. Moving back to Los Angeles, Jolie acted in several student films directed by her brother, who was then attending the University of Southern California film school; she also joined the Met Theater Group and performed alongside fellow members like Ed Harris and Holly Hunter.
After a couple forgettable films (including the direct-to-video Cyborg II: Glass Shadows), Jolie landed her first starring role in the 1995 cyber-thriller Hackers. Though the film met with a generally poor reception, Jolie earned praise for her performance; she also fell in love with co-star Jonny Lee Miller. At the couple’s wedding ceremony in March 1996, the unconventional bride wore black rubber pants and a shirt on which she had written the groom’s name in her own blood. Jolie and Miller separated less than a year later; they were divorced in 1999.
Over the next several years, Jolie’s reputation as Hollywood’s newest “bad girl” grew steadily, even as a number of highly acclaimed performances established her as a talented A-list actress. In 1997, she earned an Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe Award for her supporting turn in the TNT biopic George Wallace, starring Gary Sinise. She achieved the same feats—this time as Best Actress—the following year, for her emotionally-charged performance at the center of HBO’s Gia, based on the true story of Gia Carangi, a rebellious, heroin-addicted model who died of AIDS in the mid-1980s.
On the big screen, Jolie initially had less success, starring in several poorly received films, most notably Foxfire (1996) and Playing God (1997), co-starring Timothy Hutton and David Duchovny. She had more luck with the ensemble comedy-drama Playing By Heart (1998), appearing alongside such heavy-hitters as Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands. In 1999, Jolie appeared in three major films: the disappointing comedy Pushing Tin, co-starring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett; The Bone Collector, a thriller co-starring Denzel Washington; and Girl, Interrupted, co-starring Winona Ryder. In the latter film, Jolie’s performance as Lisa, a charismatic sociopathic inmate in a psychiatric hospital, earned her rave reviews, a third straight Golden Globe, and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
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.
After her divorce from Miller, Jolie was romantically linked to her Playing God co-star and veteran “bad boy” Hutton; they reportedly broke up in 1999. In the spring of 2000, she began dating her Pushing Tin co-star and fellow Oscar winner (Best Adapted Screenplay for 1997's Sling Blade) Thornton. The couple were married (she for the second time, he for the fifth) on May 5, 2000, in Las Vegas. They adopted a son, Maddox, in 2002, shortly before Jolie filed for divorce. In September 2002, she legally changed her name to Angelina Jolie, dropping the surname of her estranged father, Jon Voight.
In August 2001, Jolie was appointed as an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She has made visits to refugee camps in such conflict-ridden countries as Pakistan, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone. In September 2002, she donated $100,000 to a United Nations program providing food for Western Sahara refugees.
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.
(with thanks to Biography and Yahoo Movies)
