Angelina Jolie: Age, Biography, Career and Facts

Angelina Jolie (born June 4, 1975) is an American actress, director and humanitarian, an Academy Award and Tony Award winner, star of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Maleficent and Maria, and a former Special Envoy of the UN Refugee Agency. This profile covers her movies, young years, husbands, children, humanitarian work and latest news as of October 2026.

Age

Angelina Jolie was born on June 4, 1975 and is 51 years old.

Who is Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie was born Angelina Jolie Voight in Los Angeles, the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is one of the few modern film stars who is equally known for her screen work and for her public role outside cinema. Her awards include an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the Academy's honorary Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, three Golden Globes and a Tony Award as a producer of the Broadway musical The Outsiders.

She rose to global fame as the action heroine of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), after winning an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted (1999), and later built a second career as a director of serious war dramas. For more than two decades she worked with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), first as a Goodwill Ambassador from 2001 and then as its Special Envoy from 2012 until she stepped down in December 2022.

Angelina Jolie in numbers

Metric	Value
Date and place of birth	June 4, 1975, Los Angeles, California, USA
Parents	Actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand
Academy Awards	Best Supporting Actress (Girl, Interrupted, 2000 ceremony); Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (2013)
Tony Award	Best Musical (The Outsiders, producer, 2024)
Golden Globes	3 (George Wallace, Gia, Girl, Interrupted)
Films directed	5 feature films (as of October 2026)
UNHCR	Goodwill Ambassador 2001–2012, Special Envoy 2012–2022
Children	6

Young Angelina Jolie: childhood and early life

Jolie's parents separated when she was a baby and divorced in 1978 after a long separation; she and her older brother, actor James Haven, were raised mainly by their mother, who moved the family to Palisades, New York, before returning to Los Angeles. At age seven she appeared alongside her father in Lookin' to Get Out (1982), but she later said it was watching classic films with her mother that made her want to act.

As a young teenager she studied for two years at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and appeared in several stage productions. She attended Beverly Hills High School, where she has described feeling like an outsider, and she worked briefly as a model in Los Angeles, New York and London. She has spoken openly about a turbulent adolescence marked by depression and self-harm, experiences she later drew on in roles such as Gia and Girl, Interrupted. Her relationship with her father was strained for many years; they publicly reconciled in the late 2000s.

The road to the Oscar (1993–2000)

Her professional film career began with the low-budget science fiction thriller Cyborg 2 (1993), followed by her first studio lead in Hackers (1995), where she met her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller. Critics took notice of her performances in two television films: as Cornelia Wallace in John Frankenheimer's George Wallace (1997) and as the supermodel Gia Carangi in HBO's Gia (1998). Both won her Golden Globes, and Gia also earned a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy nomination.

Her breakthrough in cinema came as Lisa Rowe, a magnetic psychiatric patient opposite Winona Ryder, in Girl, Interrupted (1999). The role brought her a third Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the ceremony in March 2000. The same year she starred with Nicolas Cage in the car heist film Gone in 60 Seconds (2000).

Angelina Jolie in her prime: global stardom (2001–2021)

Playing the video game archaeologist in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) made her one of the most bankable actresses in Hollywood, and she returned for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life (2003). She played Olympias in Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) and then starred with Brad Pitt in the spy comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), one of the biggest hits of the decade and the film that started their relationship.

She balanced action vehicles such as Wanted (2008), Salt (2010) and The Tourist (2010) with dramatic work: as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart (2007) and as a mother searching for her missing son in Clint Eastwood's Changeling (2008), which brought her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. She voiced Tigress in the Kung Fu Panda animated films beginning in 2008.

Disney's Maleficent (2014), a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty villain, became the largest commercial success of her career and was followed by Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019). She also starred in Taylor Sheridan's wildfire thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead and joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thena in Chloé Zhao's Eternals (both 2021).

Work as a director and producer

Jolie made her feature directing debut with In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), a love story set during the Bosnian war, filmed in Serbo-Croatian. She followed it with Unbroken (2014), the story of Olympic runner and prisoner of war Louis Zamperini; By the Sea (2015), a marital drama in which she starred with Pitt; and First They Killed My Father (2017), a Khmer-language film about the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia, which was Cambodia's submission for the Oscars. Her fifth feature, Without Blood (2024), adapted from Alessandro Baricco's novel and starring Salma Hayek, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In 2024 she made her Broadway debut as a lead producer of The Outsiders, a musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical in June 2024; her daughter Vivienne worked on the production as an assistant.

Maria, Couture and 2026

In Pablo Larraín's Maria (2024), Jolie played opera singer Maria Callas in her final days in Paris. She trained in opera singing for months for the part, and the film premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival on August 29, 2024, where critics called it one of the best performances of her career.

Her next film, Couture, by French writer-director Alice Winocour, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025. Jolie plays an American filmmaker working at Paris Fashion Week who receives a breast cancer diagnosis, a subject close to her own family history. At the San Sebastián Film Festival that month she drew headlines by saying, "I love my country, but at this time, I don't recognize my country," while praising freedom of expression. Vertical acquired the film for the United States, and it opened in American cinemas in June 2026. In an interview with Variety tied to the release, she said her "fighting spirit" had returned thanks to her children.

Angelina Jolie and UNHCR

Jolie first encountered a humanitarian crisis while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in Cambodia. She contacted UNHCR and made her first field mission to Sierra Leone and Tanzania in February 2001. That year she donated $1 million to the agency's emergency appeal for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. On August 27, 2001, she was named a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, and over the following decade she completed dozens of field missions to refugee camps and conflict zones, from Darfur and Chad to Iraq, Syria's neighbors and Afghanistan.

On April 17, 2012, she became the first Special Envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, representing the agency in diplomatic engagements on major crises. She also co-founded the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative with then UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, and in 2014 she was made an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for services to UK foreign policy. In December 2022 she announced she was stepping down from UNHCR after more than 20 years, saying she wanted to work more directly with refugees and local organizations.

Humanitarian work since 2022

Jolie has remained active as an independent advocate. On November 5, 2025, she travelled with the UK-based Legacy of War Foundation to the frontline Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Mykolaiv, meeting medical staff, families and volunteers; Reuters and the Kyiv Independent reported that a Russian drone flew overhead during the trip. On January 2, 2026, she visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, where AP reported she met Egyptian officials and inspected the aid pipeline. In late August 2026 she made her third wartime visit to Ukraine, stopping in Kharkiv, where classrooms have been built inside metro stations, and in the Carpathians to meet families of prisoners of war.

Health and the "Angelina effect"

In May 2013 Jolie revealed in a New York Times essay titled "My Medical Choice" that she carried a BRCA1 gene mutation and had undergone a preventive double mastectomy. Her mother had died of ovarian cancer in 2007 at 56. In 2015 she wrote a second essay describing the removal of her ovaries and fallopian tubes. Doctors credited the essays with a measurable rise in genetic testing for breast cancer risk, often called the "Angelina effect."

Angelina Jolie movies

Year	Movie	Role or position
1995	Hackers	Kate Libby
1998	Gia (TV film)	Gia Carangi (Golden Globe)
1999	Girl, Interrupted	Lisa Rowe (Academy Award)
2000	Gone in 60 Seconds	Sara "Sway" Wayland
2001	Lara Croft: Tomb Raider	Lara Croft
2004	Alexander	Olympias
2005	Mr. & Mrs. Smith	Jane Smith
2007	A Mighty Heart	Mariane Pearl
2008	Wanted	Fox
2008	Changeling	Christine Collins (Oscar nomination)
2008	Kung Fu Panda	Tigress (voice)
2010	Salt	Evelyn Salt
2010	The Tourist	Elise Clifton-Ward
2011	In the Land of Blood and Honey	Writer, director
2014	Maleficent	Maleficent
2014	Unbroken	Director
2017	First They Killed My Father	Director, co-writer
2019	Maleficent: Mistress of Evil	Maleficent
2021	Eternals	Thena
2021	Those Who Wish Me Dead	Hannah Faber
2024	Without Blood	Writer, director
2024	Maria	Maria Callas
2025	Couture	Maxine

Angelina Jolie husbands and Brad Pitt

Jolie has been married three times. She married British actor Jonny Lee Miller in 1996; they separated the following year and divorced in 1999. In May 2000 she married actor Billy Bob Thornton, her co-star in Pushing Tin; they divorced in 2003.

Her relationship with Brad Pitt began after they met on Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and the couple became one of the most photographed in the world. They married on August 23, 2014, at Château Miraval in France. Jolie filed for divorce on September 19, 2016, and they were declared legally single in April 2019, but custody and financial issues kept the case in court for years. Her lawyer announced on December 31, 2024, that a divorce settlement had been signed, ending an eight-year legal battle; a separate dispute over the Miraval winery continued.

Angelina Jolie children and daughters

Jolie has six children. She adopted her son Maddox from Cambodia in 2002, daughter Zahara from Ethiopia in 2005 and son Pax from Vietnam in 2007; Pitt later became their legal adoptive father. Her biological children with Pitt are daughter Shiloh, born in Namibia in May 2006, and twins Knox and Vivienne, born in Nice, France, in July 2008. Zahara studies at Spelman College in Atlanta, and Vivienne has worked alongside her mother on Broadway. Several of the children have stopped using the Pitt surname.

Quick facts

Full birth name	Angelina Jolie Voight
Born	June 4, 1975
Birthplace	Los Angeles, USA
Profession	Actress, director, screenwriter, producer, humanitarian
Awards	Academy Award (2000), Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (2013), Tony Award (2024), 3 Golden Globes
Notable movies	Girl, Interrupted, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Changeling, Maleficent, Maria
Humanitarian roles	UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador (2001–2012), Special Envoy (2012–2022)
Spouses	Jonny Lee Miller (1996–1999), Billy Bob Thornton (2000–2003), Brad Pitt (2014–2019)
Children	Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Knox, Vivienne

Timeline

• June 4, 1975: Born in Los Angeles
• 1982: First screen appearance in her father's film Lookin' to Get Out
• 1995: First lead role in Hackers
• March 2000: Won the Academy Award for Girl, Interrupted
• 2001: Starred as Lara Croft
• August 27, 2001: Became a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador
• 2005: Starred in Mr. & Mrs. Smith
• 2011: Directorial debut with In the Land of Blood and Honey
• April 17, 2012: Appointed UNHCR Special Envoy
• May 2013: Published "My Medical Choice" in The New York Times
• 2014: Starred in Maleficent; married Brad Pitt on August 23
• September 19, 2016: Filed for divorce from Pitt
• December 2022: Stepped down from UNHCR
• June 2024: The Outsiders won the Tony Award for Best Musical
• August 29, 2024: Maria premiered in Venice
• December 30, 2024: Divorce settlement with Pitt signed
• September 2025: Couture premiered in Toronto
• November 5, 2025: Visited Kherson and Mykolaiv in Ukraine
• January 2, 2026: Visited the Rafah crossing in Egypt
• August 2026: Third wartime visit to Ukraine, including Kharkiv

Photo: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons