4th JUNE 1975 ANGELINA JOLIE WAS BORN
Angelina Jolie at 40: How blood-smeared druggie became devoted mum and humanitarian icon
She was the dark-hearted temptress who cruelly broke up Jennifer Aniston’s fairytale marriage to Brad Pitt. The script since has been worthy of a Hollywood movie
Back then, the internet was awash with women proudly wearing Team Aniston T-shirts.
Angelina Jolie was a dark-haired, dark-hearted temptress, the Other Woman who had cruelly broken up blonde Jennifer’s fairytale five-year marriage to Brad Pitt.
That was in 2005. Just a decade later we have seen a transformation worthy of a Hollywood movie.
As she celebrates her 40th birthday on Thursday, Angelina Jolie is a happily married, devoted mother of six, an award-winning actress and director, a health campaigner and a tireless UN ambassador. The overhaul is complete.
Men want to sleep with her, women want to be her. Actually, most want to sleep with her, too.
The erstwhile drug-taking, blood-wearing, sex-obsessed wannabe is now one of the planet’s most revered women, physically and politically.
Now, it seems, we are all Team Jolie.
In her serenely understated fashion, the Oscar-winning star has shunned all offers of an elaborate, glossy-magazine-covered celebration, preferring instead to spend her big Four-Oh quietly at home.
In the words of a friend: “Brad and the kids are baking her a cake and having a quiet meal at home, celebrating only with immediate family.
“She and Brad are also planning a private getaway, somewhere sunny and beachy.
“But, knowing Angelina, she will combine it with some charity work.
“She has turned down countless offers of champagne-fuelled parties and has no interest in making money off the back of turning 40.”
So, even though Brad is said to have bought her a seaplane and flying lessons for her milestone birthday, it has become really, really hard to dislike this A-lister.
And like so many of the most interesting characters, she has, to put it mildly, a chequered past.
With her first boyfriend, aged 16, she got into “knife play”, regularly drawing blood during their sexual games.
Inevitably, perhaps, this led her to self-harm, and she commented much later: “It was a kind of release, somehow therapeutic.”
By the age of 20 she was a depressed, drug-taking anorexic who has since admitted trying “every drug possible” from ecstasy to heroin.
The drug years were, she says now, about asserting her independence.
“It wasn’t a need to be destructive or rebellious. It’s that need to find a full voice, to push open the walls around you.
"You want to be free. It may come out very strange, it may be interpreted wrong, but you’re trying to find out who you are.”
In 1995 she landed her first major film break – a role in Hackers alongside British actor Jonny Lee Miller.
The couple quickly fell in lust then in love, marrying a year later with the bride wearing black rubber hotpants and a white T-shirt smeared with her groom’s name written in blood.
Following their split three years later, she embarked a fling with actress Jenny Shimizu, a woman she dated on and off for several years.
Asked if she was bisexual, she simply replied: “Of course.”
This was long before Cara Delevingne and Co. made it cool to be bi and is one of the reasons why she is still an idol to the gay community.
Her second marriage was to actor Billy Bob Thornton, 20 years her senior. They were known for their passionate displays of affection, and famously carried vials of each other’s blood around their necks before they split, again after three years, in 2003.
By now Angelina’s career had taken off.
She won an Oscar in 1999 for Girl, Interrupted. Then, by playing the action heroine title role in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider two years later, she cemented her place in the Hollywood mainstream – and as a pin-up.
Gym-fit and naturally slim (she was bullied as a child for being too skinny) her most arresting feature has always been that mouth.
And unlike most trout pouts, hers is entirely natural. She maintains her looks with regular facials and when working on location has a personal trainer to help keep her in shape.
She likes kick-boxing and is said to consume no more than 1,200 calories a day (the NHS official guideline for women is 2,000).
Back in March, her status as Woman Who Can Do No Wrong was confirmed when she revealed she’d had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed because her family history gave her a 50 per cent risk of developing ovarian cancer.
And this came two years after a preventative double mastectomy.
These stark revelations raised cancer awareness and proved that her beauty was more than skin-deep. Women warmed to her all over the world.
All of this has completely overcome the hostility she faced when she fell for Brad, now 51, on the set of their movie Mr And Mrs Smith.
At the time he appeared happily married to Jennifer Aniston, everyone’s favourite golden girl from Friends and endless Hollywood rom-coms.
Rumours of an affair grew every day, but Angelina persistently denied any wrongdoing.
Then when Brad and Jennifer announced their split, those Team Aniston T-shirts outsold the Team Jolie opposition by four to one. Angelina’s popularity plummeted.
But, as a friend explains, she did not care, which was essential to her eventual turnaround.
“By now Angelina had adopted two children, Maddox and Pax, and her priorities had changed,” said the pal.
“Family is everything to her and she is passionate about making a difference. What other people think of her is no longer a concern.
"She gradually introduced Brad to her kids, and her main priority was stability.”
Finally they went public with their romance and the formidable “Brangelina” brandwas born. Her reputation slowly recovered as she put a lot of work into her role as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations.
In a public relations double-whammy, she then adopted another orphan, Zahara, an African girl whose parents had died of AIDS. The tattooed she-devil had morphed into a globe-trotting humanitarian. Like a hot Mother Teresa.
She even formed an unlikely double act with former British Foreign Secretary William Hague on a mission to end sexual violence in conflict zones.
Angelina, who along with Brad has a combined estimated wealth of £310million, was also becoming a major player behind the cameras.
She made her directorial debut in 2011 in In The Land Of Blood And Honey and said: “Being in the spotlight’s shine doesn’t interest me.
“I prefer to have my head almost underwater than be dainty in front of the cameras.”
Last year Brad and Angelina married, exchanging vows which had been written for them by their six children who by now included three of their own – twins Vivienne and Knox, and Shiloh, nine.
Of Shiloh, the couple have casually announced her desire to be known in future as John.
Angelina explained: “She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys’ everything. She thinks she’s one of the brothers.”
Despite their wealth and high profile the couple are very hands-on parents too.
Angelina says: “We take turns working. One of us is always at home with the kids – always taking them out to things and being there with them and bringing them to school or to the set to visit Mommy or Daddy.”
Even though she is often photographed in the most elegantly beautiful outfits, she says: “I’ve a very tiny closet. Brad’s always laughing at me.
“Some days, yes, I have the nightgown that looks like a dress that I can sleep in and pick the kids up at school.”
No room for any more T-shirts then. Team Jolie or otherwise.
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