Actor Jon Voight’s daughter Julie spent most of her childhood in New York before moving to Los Angeles at the age of 11. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute for two years and then attended Beverly Hills High School. SHe later studied drama at New York University. In addition to acting in theater productions, she has appeared in modeling and music videos.Movie character
Jolie’s first major film role was in Hackers (1995), during the filming of which she met her first husband, British actor Jonny Lee Miller (married 1996; divorced 1999). The film failed to find an audience, as did a series of subsequent films. However, in 1997,Jolie gained much attention portraying the wife of Alabama’s segregationist governor in the television film George Wallace, and later won a Golden Globe Award for her role. The following year she played a supermodel struggling with drug addiction in the HBO film Gia, a performance that won her numerous awards, including a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 1999 she appeared in the comedy Pushing Ton opposite John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, and married Thornton the following year (divorced in 2003).
After winning an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, Jolie starred in a series of action films. She played the girlfriend of a carjacker (Nicolas Cage) in Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000) and later adopted a British accent for the title roles in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Lara Croft Tomb Raider and Street Fighting. And mastered kickboxing. The Cradle of Life (2003). In 2004, she portrayed the mother of Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone’s Alexander and starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Which was a sci-fi thriller set in 1930s New York City. Both films were box office disappointments, but Jolie scored a hit with Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), in which she played an assassin pretending to be an ordinary housewife. While working on the film, she met Brad Pitt, who became her partner.
In Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006), she was the grieving wife of a novice CIA agent (Matt Damon). Jolie received critical acclaim for her portrayal of Marine Pearl in A Mighty Heart (2007). Based on a true story, the film follows Pearl’s efforts to rescue her husband, Daniel, who is kidnapped and later killed by Islamic extremists while reporting in Pakistan for the Wall Street Journal. Jolie followed this with Beowulf (2007) and Wanted (2008). Her portrayal of a mother whose son is kidnapped and later replaced by another child in Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling (2008) resulted in another Oscar nomination.
Directing
In 2011 Jolie made her directing and screenwriting debut in the Bosnian language In the Land of Blood and Honey, a tumultuous love story set during the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. He then helmed the World War II drama Unbroken (2014). The film’s script, based on the true story of an Olympic runner and US Air Force officer who becomes a Japanese prisoner of war after his plane crashes, was written by the Coen brothers. In 2015, he directed, wrote and starred in By the Sea, which centers on a troubled couple in 1970s France. Pitt also starred in the play. Jolie followed with First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2017), an adaptation of Loung Ung’s memoirs about her childhood during the brutal Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s.
