A Profile of Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie sits on a molded gray steel folding chair in a cramped and sand covered room the size of a shoebox. Her infamous tattoos and chiseled model cheekbones are covered by a light pink head scarf. It's draped around her head, obscuring the lower half of her jaw. She's covered from head to toe in white muslin pants and a long tunic skimming her hips. The former Hollywood rebel sits politely in an interview room for oppressed women refuges in Afghanistan. The actress is listening to the women's individual stories and recording them in a journal to take back to the United Nations. She has been a Good Will Ambassador for the UN for several years helping refugees around the country. In movies she kicks ass, but in her own life she uses her words.

There is an inherent spiritual power behind Angelina's multiple tattoo's that speaks of her moral values. This female enigma has several ink injections on her body including, but not limited too, "strengh of will" in Arabic, the Latin phrase "What nourishes me also destroys me" and a Tennessee Williams quote, "A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages". The ethos of her life is showcased on her well-toned body, sparking critics to typecast her into the rebel realm of bad behavior. In truth, Jolie uses these markings as symbols of her life, a remembrance of the journeys she has taken and lessons she has learned.

Growing up as the daughter of famous actor Jon Voight and model mother, her background was showcased in Hollywood from birth. She started a modeling career at fourteen and starred in several of her older brother's independent films. However, she carries around the attitude: "If you don't get out of the box you've been raised in, you won't understand how much bigger the world is." This speaks to her choice in a strong, a little bit crazy, independent characters for all her movies thus far. If there is anything Jolie knows about, its embracing her inner crazy.

She has showcased her range for the mentally unstable throughout her career beginning with "Gia" the 1992 movie about the world's first supermodel and her rise to fame. The supermodel had a long drug addiction to heroin which lead to her eventual contraction of AIDS. Jolie's performance is believable as she writhes around naked in an apartment, crying and hopeless, with bleeding track marks along her forearms for most of the movie. Indeed, the actress sinks so deeply into the emotional reality of the character it is hard to separate Gia from Jolie. This beginning film not only launched her budding career but typecast her quite heavily into emotionally ambitious roles that held little sanity but carried a lot of clout.

Though she's well known for her strength of will in all her characters, she chooses to test this in a atypical environment in the movie "Girl, Interrupted". Jolie plays a mentally unstable sociopath in a mental ward during Vietnam in the sixties. Her character rules the ward and antagonizes everyone while remaining emotionally hard. Though her character is unstable, Jolie still portrays her as a strong, self-assured and independent. How this is possible while the storyline is encased in a scenario completely void of independence is a testament to the strentgh of her acting abilities.

Jolie went on to win an Oscar for her role in "Girl, Interrupted" for Best Supporting Actress. Later that night he jumped into a hotel pool at an after-party on a dare by one of the crew members. She cannon balled into the pool in a million dollar gown, and stiletto heels in front of a crowd of Hollywood elite. This is the same year she made headlines for going to the Golden Globes in "Morticia Addams" garb and bringing her brother Haven as her date. Normally family members on the red carpet aren't a big deal unless there has been a recent break-up between a famous couple and the male counterpart brings his mom as his date. Angelina was an exception. She traipsed down the red carpet arm and arm with her brother and proceeded to lip-lock him at various points on the red carpet. It wasn't a series of friendly kisses between siblings but rather an incestuous series of French kisses that created a media frenzy. From then on Angelina was synonymous with her crazy, headstrong, rebel characters and the media could no longer separate the woman from the role. It was an image she later compounded at another red carpet event where she brought her soon to be fiancee. They emerged from a limo being very publicly affectionate and giggling as they walked hand and hand down the press line. The first microphone the couple came too Jolie expressed her joy at their relationship, which was already obvious, by making it public knowledge that they had just had sex in the limo.

Angelina's male problems in the eyes of the media didn't stop with her crude relationship with her brother. Since she was young, Angelina had claimed herself independent from her father and had given up his last name in favor of her middle name. Their strained relationship continued throughout her career and she mirrored her mixed up relationship with her father with the sexual relationships she chose.

The first she chose was Johnny Lee Miller, her co-star, fellow hacker, and genius rebel, in the movie "Hackers". Their marriage lasted for two years, a considerable amount of time in Hollywood. The fearless actress wished"...I could find people who just would fight me and break through to me and hold me down and scream their life into my face".

After her divorce to her co-star Jolie thought she had found the right man. Many years her senior and known for an intense bad boy streak, her new beau, Billy Bob Thorton seemed to bring a new life and glow to the actress. On red carpets across California the couple were interacting in odd public displays of affection normally saved for Angelina's brother Haven. Her new husband did nothing to dissuade the media's view of Angelina. Arriving on the red carpet flaunting herself and Billy Bob, she showed off a new tattoo on her left shoulder, a dragon with his name under it. Not only did they share a passion for body art, but the two talked frequently of their avid and amorous sex life and their love of knives during foreplay. They also exchanged vials of each others blood which they wore around their necks. After a period of quiet, Hollywood's Goth crazy princess was back.

Thorton's new bride showed the world her new lifestyle in a canon of dark films. Though she stuck to her now well known women who kick ass role she brought more to her performances then ever before. This was showcased in "Original Sin" a non blockbuster co-starring Antonio Bandreas. Jolie was a mail-order bride who had a secret past as a hooker linked to a sadistic pimp who had been her childhood sweetheart since fourteen. Given the gravity of her role and her returned bad girl front to Hollywood with Billy Bob its no surprise that she uttered the statement further linking her to her infamous image: "I'm extremely honest, and I pride myself on it". (This can be heard in many of her interviews that year where she was candid about her life to the point of to much information.)"...I'm playful, I simply want to live the way I need to live". At that current moment in time it meant embracing strong, shocking roles and being completely sexually open to her experiences.

The sexuality she was never hesitant to show became a burden after the abrupt demise of her marriage to Billy Bob. The couple parted ways when Jolie decided to adopt a son and they divorced with irreconcilable differences. Angelina claimed to have gone publicly celibate and through linked many of her co-stars, refused to say she was seeing anyone. To clam herself the actress threw herself into different roles. This included the flop "Life or Something Like It" where her overly cynical business tycoon character finds out she has a week to live and embraces the love of a simple man and grows happy with life's gifts. This outlook was not something Jolie shared until her life changing film role in the movie "Beyond Borders".

The film, based of refugees throughout the world, and one woman's need to help, inspired Angelina to adopt a Cambodian boy. She fell in love with the culture and the people while on set and decided to start the beginning of her multi-ethnic family. Since she adopted Maddox the actress is more certain about life and who she is in it. Her role in the film inspired her to help and she laid low for a year taking the time to be a mother. Many were curious to see the turn in her personality from the destructive and slightly slutty Angelina to the celibate mother who on the side made it her goal to help the United Nations.

"I don't believe in guilt, I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person, and don't judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free." Embracing this motto, Angelina struck out with help from the UN and made her way across the globe. She wrote of her travels in a journal that was eventually published. Though not well known or well circulated the journal is candid in the actresses view of the cruelty of the world and her desperate search to help those she can who have been displaced or taken advantage of by politics.

Several years after the journal was published Jolie has flourished as an official Goodwill Ambassador for the UN. Whenever she has time off from her hectic film schedule she is making time for refugees and displaced persons across the globe. In late 2005 she was awarded a achievement award by the government and given official status as a Cambodian citizen by the king. She is low key after the demise of her second marriage, and though she is now dating famous actor Brad Pitt, having twins with him,she refuses to marry until all people, including gay couples, everywhere in the world, have the same right. Jolie has settled down as her son Maddox continues to grow up and has placed less emphasis on her career. She is more often spotted shopping for groceries then on the red carpet.

Though she has taken a break from her movie career she seems at peace. She has adopted two more children since her first son, as well as having three biological children with Pitt. She's working on making a "multi-ethnic family that's well balanced" and taking time off to be with her six children. Though her rebellious nature caught the tabloid off guard and made her an infamous vixen, her travels seemed to have brought her sought after peace. As she concentrates on being a good mother and maintaining her travels to her children's various birthplaces so they can know their heritage, Jolie makes another name for herself. To some, it is questionable who the real women inside her is: free spirited rebel or humanitarian mother. Perhaps its both. Either way she has the power to captivate, on screen and off that draws people to her in a way unlike many Hollywood stars in her time. "I'd like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don't have misconceptions-they understand. I believe that." Through giving herself whole heartedly to both sides of her personality, regardless of the the truth of one or both, Jolie has ;et the public inside herself. Though she is an enigma, its her truthful and humane nature in all her endeavors which makes people stop questioning, who is Angelina Jolie. They already know.