After her parents’ separation in 1976, Jolie and her brother lived with their mother, who had abandoned her acting ambitions to focus on raising her children. Her mother raised her Catholic but did not require her to go to church. As a child, she often watched films with her mother and it was this, rather than her father’s successful career, that inspired her interest in acting, though at age five she had a bit part in Voight’s Lookin’ to Get Out (1982). When Jolie was six years old, Bertrand and her live-in partner, filmmaker Bill Day, moved the family to Palisades, New York; they returned to Los Angeles five years later. Jolie then 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.

Jolie began her professional film career in 1993, when she played her first leading role in the direct-to-video science-fiction sequel Cyborg 2, as a near-human robot designed for corporate espionage and assassination. She was so disappointed with the film that she did not audition again for a year. Following a supporting role in the independent film Without Evidence (1995), she starred in her first Hollywood picture, Hackers (1995). The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote, “Kate stands out. That’s because she scowls even more sourly than [her co-stars] and is that rare female hacker who sits intently at her keyboard in a see-through top.” Hackers failed to make a profit at the box office, but developed a cult following after its video release.

During filming of Hackers (1995), Jolie had a romance with British actor Jonny Lee Miller, her first lover since the relationship in her early teens. They were not in touch for many months after production ended, but eventually reconnected and married soon after in March 1996. She attended her wedding in black rubber pants and a white T-shirt, upon which she had written the groom’s name in her blood. Although the relationship ended for good the following year, Jolie remained on good terms with Miller, whom she called “a solid man and a solid friend”. Their divorce, initiated by Jolie in February 1999, was finalized shortly before she remarried the next year.

In 1997, Jolie starred with David Duchovny in the thriller Playing God, set in the Los Angeles underworld. The film was not well received by critics; Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote that Jolie “finds a certain warmth in a kind of role that is usually hard and aggressive; she seems too nice to be [a mobster’s] girlfriend, and maybe she is.” Her next work, as a frontierswoman in the CBS miniseries True Women (1997), was even less successful; writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Robert Strauss dismissed her as “horrid, a fourth-rate Scarlett O’Hara” who relies on “gnashed teeth and overly pouted lips.” Jolie also starred in the music video for the Rolling Stones’s “Anybody Seen My Baby?” as a stripper who leaves mid-performance to wander New York City.

In 1999, Jolie starred in the comedy-drama Pushing Tin, alongside John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. The film met with mixed reception from critics, and Jolie’s character—Thornton’s seductive wife—was particularly criticized; writing for The Washington Post, Desson Howe dismissed her as “a completely ludicrous writer’s creation of a free-spirited woman who weeps over hibiscus plants that die, wears lots of turquoise rings and gets real lonely when Russell spends entire nights away from home.” Jolie then co-starred with Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector (1999), playing a police officer who reluctantly helps Washington’s quadriplegic detective track down a serial killer. The film grossed $151.5 million worldwide, but was critically unsuccessful. Terry Lawson of the Detroit Free Press concluded, “Jolie, while always delicious to look at, is simply and woefully miscast.”

In 2000, Jolie appeared in her first summer blockbuster, Gone in 60 Seconds, which became her highest-grossing film to that point, earning $237.2 million internationally. She had a minor role as the mechanic ex-girlfriend of a car thief played by Nicolas Cage; The Washington Post writer Stephen Hunter criticized that “all she does in this movie is stand around, cooling down, modeling those fleshy, pulsating muscle-tubes that nest so provocatively around her teeth.” Jolie later explained that the film had been a welcome relief after her emotionally demanding role in Girl, Interrupted.

After a two-month courtship, Jolie married actor Billy Bob Thornton on May 5, 2000, in Las Vegas. They had met on the set of Pushing Tin (1999), but did not pursue a relationship at that time as Thornton was engaged to actress Laura Dern, while Jolie was reportedly dating actor Timothy Hutton, her co-star in Playing God (1997). As a result of their frequent public declarations of passion and gestures of love—most famously wearing one another’s blood in vials around their necks—their marriage became a favorite topic of the entertainment media. Jolie and Thornton announced the adoption of a child from Cambodia in March 2002, but abruptly separated three months later. Their divorce was finalized on May 27, 2003. When asked about the sudden dissolution of their marriage, Jolie stated, “It took me by surprise, too, because overnight, we totally changed. I think one day we had just nothing in common. And it’s scary but … I think it can happen when you get involved and you don’t know yourself yet.”

As the daughter of actor Jon Voight, Jolie appeared in the media from an early age. After embarking on her own career, she earned a reputation as a “wild child”, which contributed to her early success in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Celebrity profiles routinely covered her fascination with blood and knives, experiences with drugs, and her sex life, particularly her bisexuality and interest in sadomasochism. In 2000, when asked about her outspokenness, she stated, “I say things that other people might go through. That’s what artists should do—throw things out there and not be perfect and not have answers for anything and see if people understand.” Another contributing factor of her controversial image were tabloid rumors of incest that started when Jolie, upon winning her Oscar, kissed her brother on the lips and said, “I’m so in love with my brother right now.” She dismissed the rumors, saying, “It was disappointing that something so beautiful and pure could be turned into a circus,” and explained that, as children of divorce, she and James relied on one another for emotional support.

Jolie’s reputation began to change positively after she, at age 26, became a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, later commenting, “In my early 20s I was fighting with myself. Now I take that punk in me to Washington, and I fight for something important.” Owing to her extensive activism, her Q Score—the industry’s measure of celebrities’ likability—nearly doubled to 25 between 2000 and 2006. Her recognizability grew accordingly; by 2006, she was familiar to 81% of Americans, compared to 31% in 2000. She became noted for her ability to positively influence her public image through the media, without employing a publicist or an agent. Her Q Score remained above average even when, in 2005, she was accused of ending Brad Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston, at which point her public persona became an unlikely combination of alleged homewrecker, mother, sex symbol, and humanitarian. A decade later, Jolie was found to be the most admired woman in the world in global surveys conducted by YouGov in 2015 and 2016.

Jolie first witnessed the effects of a humanitarian crisis while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) in war-torn Cambodia, an experience she later credited with having brought her a greater understanding of the world. Upon her return home, Jolie contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for information on international trouble spots. To learn more about the conditions in these areas, she began visiting refugee camps around the world. In February 2001, she went on her first field visit, an 18-day mission to Sierra Leone and Tanzania; she later expressed her shock at what she had witnessed.

In the following months, Jolie returned to Cambodia for two weeks and met with Afghan refugees in Pakistan, where she donated $1 million in response to an international UNHCR emergency appeal, the largest donation UNHCR had ever received from a private individual. She covered all costs related to her missions and shared the same rudimentary working and living conditions as UNHCR field staff on all of her visits. Jolie was named a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva on August 27, 2001.

Jolie has had a lifelong dysfunctional relationship with her father, which began when Voight left the family when his daughter was less than a year old. She has said that from then on their time together was sporadic and usually carried out in front of the press. They reconciled when they appeared together in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), but their relationship again deteriorated. Jolie petitioned the court to legally remove her surname “Voight” in favor of her middle name, which she had long used as a stage name; the name change was granted on September 12, 2002. Voight then went public with their estrangement during an appearance on Access Hollywood, in which he claimed Jolie had “serious mental problems.” At that point, her mother and brother also broke off contact with Voight. They did not speak for six and a half years, but began rebuilding their relationship in the wake of Bertrand’s death from ovarian cancer on January 27, 2007, before going public with their reconciliation three years later.

Jolie next starred opposite Antonio Banderas as his mail-order bride in Original Sin (2001), the first of a string of films that were poorly received by critics and audiences alike. The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell questioned Jolie’s decision to follow her Oscar-winning performance with “soft-core nonsense.” The romantic comedy Life or Something Like It (2002), though equally unsuccessful, marked an unusual choice for Jolie. Salon magazine’s Allen Barra considered her ambitious newscaster character a rare attempt at playing a conventional women’s role, noting that her performance “doesn’t get off the ground until a scene where she goes punk and leads a group of striking bus workers in singing ‘Satisfaction'”. Despite her lack of box office success, Jolie remained in demand as an actress; in 2002, she established herself among Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses, earning $10–$15 million per film for the next five years.

Over the next decade, she went on more than 40 field missions, meeting with refugees and internally displaced persons in over 30 countries. In 2002, when asked what she hoped to accomplish, she stated, “Awareness of the plight of these people. I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon.” To that end, her 2001–02 field visits were chronicled in her book Notes from My Travels, which was published in October 2003 in conjunction with the release of her humanitarian drama Beyond Borders.

Jolie has received wide recognition for her humanitarian work. In August 2002, she received the inaugural Humanitarian Award from the Church World Service’s Immigration and Refugee Program, and in October 2003, she was the first recipient of the Citizen of the World Award by the United Nations Correspondents Association. She was awarded the Global Humanitarian Award by the UNA-USA in October 2005, and she received the Freedom Award from the International Rescue Committee in November 2007. In October 2011, UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres presented Jolie with a gold pin reserved for the most long-serving staff, in recognition of her decade as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador.

On March 10, 2002, Jolie adopted her first child, seven-month-old Maddox Chivan, from an orphanage in Battambang, Cambodia. He was born as Rath Vibol on August 5, 2001, in a local village. After twice visiting Cambodia, while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and on a UNHCR field mission, Jolie returned in November 2001 with her husband, Billy Bob Thornton, where they met Maddox and subsequently applied to adopt him. The adoption process was halted the following month when the U.S. government banned adoptions from Cambodia amid allegations of child trafficking. Although Jolie’s adoption facilitator was later convicted of visa fraud and money laundering, her adoption of Maddox was deemed lawful. Once the process was finalized, she took custody of him in Namibia, where she was filming Beyond Borders (2003). Jolie and Thornton announced the adoption together, but she adopted Maddox alone, and raised him as a single parent following their separation three months later.

Beyond her career, Jolie’s appearance has been credited with influencing popular culture at large. In 2002, AfterEllen founder Sarah Warn observed that many women of all sexual orientations had publicly expressed their attraction to Jolie, which she considered a new development in American culture, adding that “there are many beautiful women in Hollywood, and few generate the same kind of overwhelming interest across genders and sexual orientations that she does”. Jolie’s physical attributes became highly sought-after among western women seeking cosmetic surgery; by 2007, she was considered “the gold standard of beauty”, with her full lips remaining the most imitated celebrity feature well into the 2010s. After a 2011 repeat survey by Allure found that Jolie most represented the American beauty ideal, compared to model Christie Brinkley in 1991, writer Elizabeth Angell credited society with having “branched out beyond the Barbie-doll ideal and embraced something quite different”. In 2013, Jeffrey Kluger of Time agreed that Jolie has for many years symbolized the feminine ideal, and opined that her frank discussion of her double mastectomy redefined beauty.

In an effort to connect her Cambodian-born adopted son with his heritage, Jolie purchased a house in his country of birth in 2003. The traditional home sat on 39 hectares in the northwestern province Battambang, adjacent to Samlout national park in the Cardamom mountains, which had become infiltrated with poachers who threatened endangered species. She purchased the park’s 60,000 hectares and turned the area into a wildlife reserve named for her son, the Maddox Jolie Project. In recognition of her conservation efforts, King Norodom Sihamoni awarded her Cambodian citizenship on July 31, 2005.

Prior to her marriage to Miller, Jolie began a relationship with model-actress Jenny Shimizu on the set of Foxfire (1996). She later said, “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.” According to Shimizu, their relationship lasted several years and continued even while Jolie was romantically involved with other people. In 2003, when asked if she was bisexual, Jolie 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!”

Jolie first attended Beverly Hills High School, where she felt isolated among the children of some of the area’s affluent families because her mother survived on a more modest income. She was teased by other students, who targeted her for being extremely thin and for wearing glasses and braces. Her early attempts at modeling, at her mother’s insistence, proved unsuccessful. She then transferred to Moreno High School, an alternative school, where she became a “punk outsider,” wearing all-black clothing, going out moshing, and experimenting with knife play with her live-in boyfriend. She dropped out of her acting classes and aspired to become a funeral director, taking at-home courses to study embalming. At age 16, after the relationship had ended, Jolie graduated from high school and rented her own apartment, before returning to theater studies, though in 2004 she referred to this period with the observation, “I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos.”

The year 2004 saw the release of four films featuring Jolie. She first starred in the thriller Taking Lives as an FBI profiler summoned to help Montreal law enforcement hunt down a serial killer. The film received mixed reviews; The Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt concluded, “Jolie plays a role that definitely feels like something she has already done, but she does add an unmistakable dash of excitement and glamour.” Jolie made a brief appearance as a fighter pilot in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a science fiction adventure shot entirely with actors in front of a bluescreen, and voiced her first family film, the DreamWorks animation Shark Tale. Her supporting role as Queen Olympias in Oliver Stone’s Alexander, about the life of Alexander the Great, was met with mixed reception, particularly concerning her Slavic accent. Commercially, the film failed in North America, which Stone attributed to disapproval of the depiction of Alexander’s bisexuality, but it succeeded internationally, grossing $167.3 million.

Jolie aimed to visit what she termed “forgotten emergencies,” crises that media attention had shifted away from. She became noted for traveling to war zones, such as Sudan’s Darfur region during the Darfur conflict, the Syrian-Iraqi border during the Second Gulf War, where she met privately with U.S. troops and other multi-national forces, and the Afghan capital Kabul during the war in Afghanistan, where three aid workers were murdered in the midst of her first visit. To aid her travels, she began taking flying lessons in 2004 with the aim of ferrying aid workers and food supplies around the world; she now holds a private pilot license with instrument rating and owns a Cirrus SR22 and Cessna 208 Caravan single-engine aircraft.

In 2005, Jolie returned to major box office success with the action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which she starred opposite Brad Pitt as a bored married couple who find out that they are both secret assassins. The film received mixed reviews, but was generally lauded for the chemistry between the two leads; Star Tribune critic Colin Covert noted, “While the story feels haphazard, the movie gets by on gregarious charm, galloping energy and the stars’ thermonuclear screen chemistry.” With box office takings of $478.2 million worldwide, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was the seventh-highest grossing picture of the year and remained Jolie’s highest-grossing live-action film for the next decade.

Jolie has funded a school and boarding facility for girls at Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, which opened in 2005, and two primary schools for girls in the returnee settlements Tangi and Qalai Gudar in eastern Afghanistan, which opened in March 2010 and November 2012 respectively. In addition to the facilities at the Millennium Village she established in Cambodia, Jolie had built at least ten other schools in the country by 2005. In February 2006, she opened the Maddox Chivan Children’s Center, a medical and educational facility for children affected by HIV, in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. In Sebeta, Ethiopia, the birthplace of her eldest daughter, she funds a sister facility, the Zahara Children’s Center, which is expected to open in 2015 and will treat and educate children suffering from HIV or tuberculosis. Both centers are run by the Global Health Committee.

Jolie was involved in a well-publicized Hollywood scandal when she was accused of having caused the divorce of actors Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston in October 2005. She said she fell in love with Pitt during filming of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), but she dismissed allegations of an affair, saying, “To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.” Jolie and Pitt did not publicly comment on the nature of their relationship until January 2006, when she confirmed that she was pregnant with his child.

Jolie adopted a daughter, six-month-old Zahara Marley, from an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 6, 2005. Zahara was born as Yemsrach on January 8, 2005, in Awasa. Jolie initially believed Zahara to be an AIDS orphan, based on official testimony from her grandmother, but her birth mother later came forward in the media. She explained that she had abandoned her family when Zahara became sick, and said she thought Zahara was “very fortunate” to have been adopted by Jolie. Jolie was accompanied by her partner, Brad Pitt, when she traveled to Ethiopia to take custody of Zahara. She later indicated that they had together made the decision to adopt from Ethiopia, having first visited the country earlier that year. After Pitt announced his intention to adopt her children, she filed a petition to legally change their surname from Jolie to Jolie-Pitt, which was granted on January 19, 2006. Pitt adopted Maddox and Zahara soon after.

In November 2006, Jolie expanded the scope of the project—renamed the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation (MJP)—to create Asia’s first Millennium Village, in accordance with UN development goals. She was inspired by a meeting with the founder of Millennium Promise, noted economist Jeffrey Sachs, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where she was an invited speaker in 2005 and 2006. Together they filmed a 2005 MTV special, The Diary of Angelina Jolie & Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa, which followed them on a trip to a Millennium Village in western Kenya. By mid-2007, some 6,000 villagers and 72 employees—some of them former poachers employed as rangers—lived and worked at MJP, in ten villages previously isolated from one another. The compound includes schools, roads, and a soy milk factory, all funded by Jolie. Her home functions as the MJP field headquarters.

In an attempt to avoid the unprecedented media frenzy surrounding their relationship, Jolie and Pitt traveled to Namibia for the birth of their first biological child. On May 27, 2006, she gave birth to a daughter, Shiloh Nouvel, in Swakopmund. They sold the first pictures of Shiloh through the distributor Getty Images with the aim of benefiting charity, rather than allowing paparazzi to take these valuable photographs. People and Hello! purchased the North American and British rights to the images for $4.1 and $3.5 million respectively, a record in celebrity photojournalism at that time, with all proceeds donated to UNICEF.

Jolie’s general influence and wealth are extensively documented. In a 2006 global industry survey by ACNielsen in 42 international markets, Jolie, together with Pitt, was found to be the favorite celebrity endorser for brands and products worldwide. Jolie was the face of St. John and Shiseido from 2006 to 2008, and a decade later became a spokesmodel for Guerlain. Her 2011 endorsement deal with Louis Vuitton, reportedly worth $10 million, was a record for a single advertising campaign. Jolie was among the Time 100, a list of the most influential people in the world as published by Time, in 2006 and 2008. She was named the world’s most powerful celebrity in Forbes’s Celebrity 100 issue in 2009, and, though ranked lower overall, was listed as the most powerful actress from 2006 to 2008 and 2011 to 2013. Forbes additionally cited her as Hollywood’s highest-paid actress in 2009, 2011, and 2013, with estimated annual earnings of $27 million, $30 million, and $33 million respectively.

After her mother’s death in 2007, Jolie appeared in fewer films, later explaining that her motivation to be an actress had stemmed from her mother’s acting ambitions. Her first film in two years was the 2010 thriller Salt, in which she starred as a CIA agent who goes on the run after she is accused of being a KGB sleeper agent. Originally written as a male character with Tom Cruise attached to star, agent Salt underwent a gender change after a Columbia Pictures executive suggested Jolie for the role. With revenues of $293.5 million, Salt became an international success. The film received generally positive reviews, with Jolie’s performance in particular earning praise; Empire magazine critic William Thomas remarked, “When it comes to selling incredible, crazy, death-defying antics, Jolie has few peers in the action business.”

Jolie has also advocated for children’s education. Since its founding at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting in September 2007, she has co-chaired the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict, which provides policy and funding to education programs for children in conflict-affected regions. In its first year, the partnership supported education projects for Iraqi refugee children, youth affected by the Darfur conflict, and girls in rural Afghanistan, among other affected groups. The partnership has worked closely with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Universal Education—founded by the partnership’s co-chair, noted economist Gene Sperling—to establish education policies, which resulted in recommendations made to UN agencies, G8 development agencies, and the World Bank. Since April 2013, all proceeds from Jolie’s high-end jewelry collection, Style of Jolie, have benefited the partnership’s work. Jolie additionally launched the Malala Fund, a grant system established by Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, at the 2013 Women in the World Summit; she personally contributed over $200,000 to the cause.

After Jolie joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in June 2007, she hosted a symposium on international law and justice at CFR headquarters and funded several CFR special reports, including “Intervention to Stop Genocide and Mass Atrocities.” In January 2011, she established the Jolie Legal Fellowship, a network of lawyers and attorneys who are sponsored to advocate the development of human rights in their countries. Its member attorneys, called Jolie Legal Fellows, have facilitated child protection efforts in Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake and promoted the development of an inclusive democratic process in Libya following the 2011 revolution.

On March 15, 2007, Jolie adopted a son, three-year-old Pax Thien, from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He was born as Pham Quang Sang on November 29, 2003, in HCMC, where he was abandoned by his biological mother soon after birth. After visiting the orphanage with Pitt in November 2006, Jolie applied for adoption as a single parent, because Vietnam’s adoption regulations do not allow unmarried couples to co-adopt. After their return to the U.S., she petitioned the court to change her son’s surname from Jolie to Jolie-Pitt, which was approved on May 31. Pitt subsequently adopted Pax on February 21, 2008.

By 2008, Jolie was considered the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, earning $15–$20 million per film. While other actresses had been forced to take salary cuts in recent years, Jolie’s perceived box office appeal allowed her to command as much as $20 million plus a percentage. She starred alongside James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman in the action film Wanted (2008), which proved an international success, earning $341.4 million worldwide. The film received predominantly favorable reviews; writing for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis noted that Jolie was “perfectly cast as a super-scary, seemingly amoral assassin,” adding that “she cuts the kind of disciplinarian figure who can bring boys of all ages to their knees or at least into their theater seats.”

At the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, Jolie confirmed that she was expecting twins. For the two weeks she spent in a seaside hospital in Nice, France, reporters and photographers camped outside on the promenade. She gave birth to a son, Knox Léon, and a daughter, Vivienne Marcheline, on July 12, 2008. The first pictures of Knox and Vivienne were jointly sold to People and Hello! for a reported $14 million—the most expensive celebrity photographs ever taken. All proceeds were donated to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

After filming Beyond Borders (2003) in Namibia, Jolie became patron of the Harnas Wildlife Foundation, a wildlife orphanage and medical center in the Kalahari desert. She first visited the Harnas farm during production of the film, which features vultures rescued by the foundation. In December 2010, Jolie and her partner, Brad Pitt, established the Shiloh Jolie-Pitt Foundation to support conservation work by the Naankuse Wildlife Sanctuary, a nature reserve also located in the Kalahari. In name of their Namibian-born daughter, they have funded large-animal conservation projects as well as a free health clinic, housing, and a school for the San Bushmen community at Naankuse. Jolie and Pitt support other causes through the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, established in September 2006.

On April 17, 2012, after more than a decade of service as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie was promoted to the rank of Special Envoy to High Commissioner António Guterres, the first to take on such a position within the organization. In her expanded role, she was given authority to represent Guterres and UNHCR at the diplomatic level, with a focus on major refugee crises. In the months following her promotion, she made her first visit as Special Envoy—her third over all—to Ecuador, where she met with Colombian refugees, and she accompanied Guterres on a week-long tour of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, to assess the situation of refugees from neighboring Syria. Since then, Jolie has been on over a dozen field missions around the world to meet with refugees and undertake advocacy on their behalf.

Jolie has fronted a campaign against sexual violence in military conflict zones by the UK government, which made the issue a priority of its 2013 G8 presidency. In May 2012, she launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI) with Foreign Secretary William Hague, who was inspired to campaign on the issue by her Bosnian war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011). PSVI was established to complement wider UK government work by raising awareness and promoting international co-operation. Jolie spoke on the subject at the G8 foreign ministers meeting, where the attending nations adopted a historic declaration, and before the UN security council, which responded by adopting its broadest resolution on the issue to date. In June 2014, she co-chaired the four-day Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, the largest-ever meeting on the subject, which resulted in a protocol endorsed by 151 nations.

During their twelve-year relationship, the couple were dubbed “Brangelina”—a portmanteau coined by the entertainment media—and were the subject of worldwide media coverage. Lorraine Ali of Los Angeles Times stated that they became one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples. Their family grew to include six children, three of whom were adopted, before they announced their engagement in April 2012. Jolie and Pitt married on August 23, 2014, at their estate Château Miraval in Correns, France. She subsequently took the name “Jolie Pitt”. After two years of marriage, the couple separated in September 2016. In her divorce filing, Jolie requested physical custody of their children. On November 11, 2018, a new custody agreement was established between Jolie and Pitt. On April 12, 2019, the court restored Jolie and Pitt to single status.

In November 2013, Jolie received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Academy Award, from the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In June 2014, she was appointed an Honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (DCMG) for her services to the UK’s foreign policy and campaigning to end sexual violence in war zones. Queen Elizabeth II presented Jolie with the insignia of her honorary damehood during a private ceremony the following October.

On February 16, 2013, at age 37, Jolie underwent a preventive double mastectomy after learning she had an 87% risk of developing breast cancer due to a defective BRCA1 gene. Her maternal family history warranted genetic testing for BRCA mutations: her mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand, had breast cancer and died from ovarian cancer, while her grandmother died from ovarian cancer. Her aunt, who had the same BRCA1 defect, died from breast cancer three months after Jolie’s operation. Following the mastectomy, which lowered her chances of developing breast cancer to under 5 percent, Jolie had reconstructive surgery involving implants and allografts. Two years later, in March 2015, after annual test results indicated possible signs of early ovarian cancer, she underwent a preventive salpingo-oophorectomy, as she had a 50% risk of developing ovarian cancer due to the same genetic anomaly. Despite hormone replacement therapy, the surgery brought on premature menopause.

Through her work on the PSVI, Jolie met foreign policy experts Chloe Dalton and Arminka Helic, who served as special advisers to Hague. Their collaboration resulted in the 2015 founding of Jolie Pitt Dalton Helic, a partnership dedicated to women’s rights and international justice, among other causes. In May 2016, Jolie was appointed a visiting professor at the London School of Economics to contribute to a postgraduate degree program at the university’s Centre on Women, Peace and Security, which she had launched with Hague the previous year.

On September 9, 2020, Angelina Jolie made a generous donation to two young boys, who were running a lemonade stand in London. The boys were raising money through the stall for the people of Yemen, as the country was on the brink of humanitarian crisis caused by the Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels.