Angie was born Angelina Jolie Voight on June 4th, 1975 in Los Angeles, California. She is the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. Her older brother is actor/producer James Haven. In 1976, still only a baby, Angelina’s parents divorced. She and her brother James moved with their mother to Palisades, New York.

As a child, Angelina played with snakes and lizards and enjoyed watching films with her mother. This inspired her interest in acting. At age 11, she and her family moved back to Los Angeles. It was then that Angie decided she wanted to act and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she trained for two years and appeared in several stage productions. In high school, Beverly Hills High, she was teased by other students for her distinctive features, being extremely thin, and for wearing eye glasses and braces. Her first attempts at modeling failed, which fully demolished her self esteem. As a result, she fell into a depression and began to cut herself. "I collected knives and always had certain things around. For some reason, the ritual of having cut myself and feeling the pain, maybe feeling alive, feeling some kind of release, it was somehow therapeutic to me."

At age 14, she dropped out of her acting classes. This led her to embark on a rebellious period in her life. She dreamt of becoming a funeral director, wore black, dyed her hair purple, and enjoyed dancing around in mosh pits with her live-in boyfriend. "I wore black fishnets and boots because i wanted to hide myself. I wanted to feel everything and go slam dancing. But at the same time, I was doing plays and taking ballroom classes at Arthur Murray. I'd wash off all the ink I had drawn on my arms, take off my twenty hole doc martens, and put on high heels and a dress and win tango competitions. My friends thought i was insane. But i thought it was fun" She also began working as a fashion model, signed with Finesse Model Management. Angie modeled in both the United States and Europe, working mainly in Los Angeles, New York and London. Appeared in numerous music videos, including Meat Loaf (“Rock’nRoll Dreams Come Through”), Antonello Venditti (“Alta Marea”) and Lenny Kravitz (“Stand by my Woman”) After her two year relationship with her live-in boyfriend ended, she moved into her own apartment above a garage a few blocks away from her mother’s home. Returned to her theatre studies and graduated from high school.

At the age of 16, Angie played her first role as a German dominatrix. She began to learn from her father, noticing his method of acting is to observe people to become like them. Angie appeared in five of older brother James student films, made while he attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her professional movie career began in 1993, she played her first leading role in a low budget film Cyborg 2, as Casella “Cash” Reese, a near-human robot. In 1995 she starred as Kate “Acid Burn” Libby in her first Hollywood picture, Hackers, Where she met and fell in love with actor Jonny Lee Miller. The two were married on March 28th, 1996. Angie wore black leather pants, and a white shirt. Across the back of her white shirt, she painted Jonny’s name in her own blood. They divorced on February 3, 1999, but remain really close friends. "It comes down to timing. I think he's the greatest husband a girl could ask for. I'll always love him, we were simply too young."

She appeared as “Gina Malacici” in the 1996 comedy Love Is All There Is and played a youngster named Elenoar Rigby in the movie Mojave Moon. Her next 1996 film, Foxfire, Angie played Margret “Legs” Sadovsky, one of five teenage girls who form an unlikely bond after they beat up a teacher who has sexually harassed them. During filming, she began a long on again off again sexual relationship with her Foxfire co-star Jenny Shimizu. "I would probably have married Jenny if I hadn't married my husband. I fell in love with her the first second I saw her". When asked if she is bisexual in a 2003 interview with Barbara Walters Angie responded, "Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it's okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!"

In 1997 Angie starred in the thriller Playing God, the film was not well received by critics. She then appeared in the TV movie True Women, a historical romantic drama set in the West, and based on the book by Janice Woods Windle. Angie’s career began to improve after her performance as Cornelia Wallace in the 1997 biopic George Wallace. She played the second wife of the segregationist Governor of Alabama who was shot and paralyzed while running for President. The film starred Gary Sinise and was directed by John Frankenheimer. The film was highly praised by critics and gave Angelina an Emmy nomination and winning the Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture.

In 1998 Angie starred in the HBO film Gia, playing supermodel Gia Carangi. The film involved world of sex, drugs, and emotional drama, and chronicled the destruction of Gia’s life and career. For the second consecutive year, Angie won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of Gia Carangi. She also won her first Screen Actors Guild Award. In accordance with Lee Strasberg’s Method acting Angie prefers to stay in character in between scenes during many of her films, and as a result gained a reputation for being difficult to deal with. While shooting Gia, she told husband Jonny Lee Miller that she wouldn’t be able to phone him. "I'd tell him: 'I'm alone; I'm dying; I'm gay; I'm not going to see you for weeks.” After her success with Gia, Angie moved to New York and stopped acting for a short period of time, she felt that she had “nothing else to give”. She enrolled at New York University to study filmmaking and attended writing classes. She described it as “just good for me to collect myself”.

Angie returned to film as Gloria McNeary in the 1998 gangster movie Hell’s Kitchen, and later that year was part of an ensemble cast that included Sean Connery, Gillian Anderson, Ryan Phillippe and Jon Stewart in Playing by Heart. In 1999 she starred in the comedy-drama Pushing Tin. Where she met her second husband, co-star Billy Bob Thorton. In her next film project she worked with Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector. She played Amelia Donaghy, a police officer haunted by her cop father’s suicide, who is reluctant to help Washington track down a serial killer. The movie grossed $151 million worldwide, but was a critical failure.

To be continued…….