Angelina Jolie

Name at birth: Angelina Jolie Voight

Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie is known as much for her offscreen romances, adoptions and political activism as for her movie roles. Jolie first made a small splash in 1998, playing doomed model Gia Marie Carangi in the HBO movie Gia. She was a hit as the love interest in the offbeat air-traffic-controller drama Pushing Tin (1999, with John Cusack), but winning an Oscar for her supporting role as a troubled mental patient in the 1999 Winona Ryder film Girl, Interrupted made her a big-time movie star. She sealed her international fame by playing the video game heroine Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (2001) and Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life (2003). Jolie's plush-lipped, brooding Gothic presence (and ample tattoos) made her a hit with the younger generation, and her wild-life offscreen antics made her a hit with the tabloids, especially while she was married to her Pushing Tin co-star, Billy Bob Thornton (2000-2003). Jolie has since become famous for her charitable impulses: she was named a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees in 2001. She adopted a Cambodian boy, Maddox (in 2002), a daughter born in Ethiopia, Zahara (in 2005), and a boy from Vietnam, Pax Thien (in 2007). She and Brad Pitt starred in the action film Mr. & Mrs. Smith in 2005, but whatever excitement the movie generated was overshadowed by the real-life drama of Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston to move in with Jolie. Jolie's first biological child with Pitt, a daughter named Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, was born in 2006 at a resort in Namibia. They also have a son and daughter, Knox and Vivienne, born on 12 July 2008 in Nice, France.