Angeline Jolie is undoubtedly one of the most popular actresses of her time with a filmography that rivals other contemporaries. Her beauty has always become the subject of many surveys and contests where she is ranked in the top tier by magazines and other companies who extol such attributes (sexiest woman, most beautiful, etc). She had earned major awards in the span of her long acting career namely, an Academy award, 3 Golden Globe awards as well as 2 more from the Screen Actors Guild.

Headstart as a Child

Born to actor Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, she got to train and perform at Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. There, she honed her acting skills in stage productions. She also modeled and became a professional model in key cities such as Los Angeles, her birth place, New York and London. And she also appeared in music videos with artists Lenny Kravitz, Meat Loaf, The Lemonheads and Antonello Venditti. She was also part of 5 experimental films at the USC School of Cinema which were all under the direction of her beloved brother, James Haven. Angelina took up film studies at the New York University. Later on, she joined Los Angeles’ Met Theater Group.

Strong Performances

In the 1990s, Angelina received good notices for her performances in Hackers and Foxfire which went a notch higher for her roles in True Women and George Wallace, both shown in 1997 television. The following year, she played lead in Gia, an HBO production which was a true to life story of a supermodel. The character, Gia Carangi, was a wild sensitive child who had trouble getting a good handle of her career success coupled with deaths of people close to her. This supermodel became hooked on drugs which eventually caused her to contract AIDS that led to her death at a young age of 26. For her noteworthy performance as Gia, Angelina Jolie won a Golden Globe award and SAG award with a nomination from Emmy awards.

In the movie Bone Collector starring Denzel Washington, Angelina got her major break followed by another successful performance in Girl, Interrupted with Winona Ryder. Although Girl, Interrupted was not a smash at the box-office, it earned for Angelina awards from the Golden Globe, SAG Award and Academy Award as supporting actress in a movie.

By 2000, Angelina starred in the first of the Lara Croft series, Tomb Raider which was initially not interesting to the actress, but it was the training required for the stunts that intrigued her into taking on the role eventually. A female Indiana Jones/James Bond has its charisma with the public, and the ticket sales ran counter to critic’s unimpressive reviews about the film. It is while filming one of the Lara Croft movies where Angelina first got a taste of Cambodia, which started her humanitarian sojourn to refugee camps all over the world. Let’s not forget the movie that brought Angelina and Brad Pitt together through 2004s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, who, to this day, lives together with their children.