Before Jolie began a career as an actress, she was a model who was signed with Finesse Model Management and modeled in both the United States and Europe, working mainly in in Los Angeles, New York and London.

She also appeared in numerous music videos, including those of Korn ("Did My Time"), Meat Loaf ("Rock'n'Roll Dreams Come Through"), Lenny Kravitz ("Stand by My Woman") and The Rolling Stones ("Anybody Seen My Baby").

At the age of 16 Jolie went back to theatre. Now committed to acting, her first role was a German dominatrix. She began to learn from her father, noticed how he would watch people, talk to them, become like them. She stopped fighting with him so much too, realising that they were both "drama queens".

Jolie had appeared in five of her brother's student films, made while he attended the USC School of Cinema-Television, but her movie career properly began in 1993, when she got her first leading role as Casella "Cash" Reese in Cyborg 2, playing a near-human robot, designed to seduce her way into the HQ of her creators' rivals and blow up. Following several undistinguished projects she then starred in the 1995 film Hackers as Kate "Acid Burn" Libby where she met her first husband Jonny Lee Miller. The movie failed to make a profit at the box-office, but has developed a cult following from its video release.

Now roles started coming fast for Jolie. In 1996 she starred with David Duchovny in the stylish thriller Playing God portraying a famed LA surgeon who is stripped of his medical license and is lured deep into the criminal world where he meets Jolie’s character Claire. Then, in the road movie Mojave Moon, she was a youngster, named Eleanor Rigby, who falls for Danny Aiello, while he takes a shine to her mother, Anne Archer. Still in 1996 she was one of five teenage girls who form an unlikely bond in the film Foxfire after they beat up a teacher who has sexually harassed them. Jolie's next release was the 1997 TV movie True Women, a historical romantic drama set in the West, based on the book by Janice Woods Windle. Back to top

Following her Oscar success, Jolie was a well respected actress in Hollywood, but it was the 2001 videogame adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider that made her an international superstar. To play videogame heroine Lara Croft, she had to master a British accent and extensive martial arts training which she managed convincingly. The movie was a huge international success earning $275 million worldwide and started her reputation as the top female action star. She also earned a reported $7 million which put her into the highest league of female actresses.

Jolie then starred alongside Antonio Banderas as the mail order bride Julia Russell in Original Sin, a thriller based on the novel Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich and one year later in 2001 she played Lanie Kerrigan in Life or Something Like It, a film about an ambitious TV reporter who is told that she will die in a week. Both films were box office disappointments.

Jolie reprised her role as Lara Croft in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life in 2003. The sequel couldn’t achieve the success of the original, but it still was a solid hit with over $156 million at the international box-office. Jolie was paid $12 million for this second installment. Later that year Jolie starred in Beyond Borders, a film about aid workers in Africa. Although well-intentioned, and reflecting Jolie's real-life interest in promoting humanitarian relief, the film was critically and financially unsuccessful. Concurrently with the release of the film, Jolie published Notes from My Travels.

In 2004 Jolie first starred alongside Ethan Hawke in the thriller Taking Lives, where she plays FBI profiler Illeana Scott who is summoned to help out Canadian law enforcement in Montreal, to hunt down a serial killer. She also lent her voice to Lola in the animated DreamWorks movie Shark Tale; the cast included Will Smith, Martin Scorsese, Renée Zellweger, Jack Black and Robert De Niro. Also in 2004 Jolie appeared as Franky in Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a science fiction adventure film set in New York City in an alternative 1939. It is one of the first movies to be shot with actors entirely in front of a bluescreen, with all the sets and nearly all of the props computer-generated. Jolie then played Olympias in Oliver Stone’s biopic Alexander about the life of Alexander the Great. The film failed domestically, mainly due to criticism regarding Alexander’s homosexuality, but succeeded internationally with $139 million outside United States.

Jolie's only movie of 2005, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is also her biggest commercial success to date. The film was directed by Doug Liman and written by Simon Kinberg and tells the story about a bored married couple who find out that they're both secret assassins. Jolie starred as Jane Smith alongside Brad Pitt. The movie earned over $478 million worldwide, making it one of the biggest hits of 2005.

Jolie filmed her part in Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd during the second half of 2005, a movie about the early history of the CIA through the eyes of Edward Wilson, played by Matt Damon. Jolie will co-star as Clover Wilson, Damon's wife who becomes an alcoholic through the course of the movie. The film is seen as Jolie’s return to dramatic roles.

Jolie's confirmed future projects include the animated movies Beowulf and Kung Fu Panda, as well as A Mighty Heart, a film based on the life of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan; she will star as Pearl’s wife, Mariane Pearl. She is also rumored to be involved in Sin City 2 as well as the movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, while she will not appear in a third Tomb Raider movie, as it was falsely reported.

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