American actress and filmmaker Angelina Jolie was BOTD in 1975. Born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of actor Jon Voight, she spent her early life in New York and Los Angeles, studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and later at New York University. She made her first major film appearance in the 1995 thriller Hackers, later marrying her co-star Johnny Lee Miller. She won back-to-back Golden Globe Awards for two radically different TV film performances, as the wife of a segregationist politician in George Wallace, and as drug-addicted bisexual supermodel Gia Carangi in the biopic Gia. Jolie’s performance as Carangi prompted film critic Pauline Kael to exclaim, “My God… this girl could play both the [Marlon] Brando and Maria Schneider roles in Last Tango [in Paris]!” She married another co-star, Billy Bob Thornton, after appearing together in the comedy Pushing Tin, making headlines for getting his-and-hers tattoos and wearing vials of each other’s blood. In 1999, she won an Oscar for playing a charismatic sociopath in indie film Girl, Interrupted, solidifying her public image as a compelling if unstable wild-child. By now a fully-fledged star, she starred in a series of Hollywood action films, memorably embodying video game heroine Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider film franchise. In 2005, she co-starred with Brad Pitt in Mr and Mrs Smith, a lacklustre comedy about husband-and-wife assassins made memorable by their smoking hot chemistry. Rumours about an affair spread before the film’s release, vigorously denied by Pitt, who at the time was married to Friends star Jennifer Aniston. Months after the film’s release, Pitt left Aniston for Jolie, prompting a tabloid storm of unprecedented ferocity in which Jolie was painted as a home-wrecking whore. Seeking to diversify her image, she played activist Mariane Pearl in the biopic A Mighty Heart and the mother of an abducted child in Changeling (the latter earning her an Oscar nomination). Offscreen, she adopted a menagerie of children with Pitt and undertook humanitarian work for the United Nations, prompting both praise and criticism for undergoing a preventive double mastectomy. She made a return to movie stardom in 2014’s Maleficent, a live-action drama about the wicked Queen from Disney film Sleeping Beauty, and directed the earnest war dramas In the Land of Blood and Honey and Unbroken. Jolie and Pitt married in 2014, despite previous promises not to marry until gay marriage was legalised in the United States. The following year, they co-starred in Jolie’s next directorial effort By the Sea, a sobering drama about an unhappily married couple. Their separation in 2016 prompted another tabloid furore and an exhausting nine-year custody battle for their children. After several years offscreen, Jolie starred as opera diva Maria Callas in the 2024 biopic Maria. Openly bisexual since forever, Jolie had a well-publicised relationship with model Jenny Shimizu in between her marriages to Miller and Thornton. Jolie lives in Los Angeles with her children. Her current relationship status is unknown.