Angelina Jolie

Name at birth: Angelina Jolie Voight

Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie is known as much for her offscreen romances, adoptions and political activism as for her movie roles. Jolie first made a small splash in 1998, playing doomed model Gia Marie Carangi in the HBO movie Gia. She was a hit as the love interest in the offbeat air-traffic-controller drama Pushing Tin (1999, with John Cusack), but winning an Oscar for her supporting role as a troubled mental patient in the 1999 Winona Ryder film Girl, Interrupted made her a big-time movie star. She sealed her international fame (and box office clout) by playing the video game heroine Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (2001) and Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life (2003). Jolie's plush-lipped, brooding Gothic presence (and ample tattoos) made her a hit with the younger generation, and her wild-life offscreen antics made her a hit with the tabloids, especially while she was married to her Pushing Tin co-star, Billy Bob Thornton (2000-2003). Jolie has since become famous for her charitable impulses: she was named a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees in 2001. She adopted a Cambodian boy, Maddox (in 2002), a daughter born in Ethiopia, Zahara (in 2005), and a boy from Vietnam, Pax Thien (in 2007). She and Brad Pitt starred in the action film Mr. & Mrs. Smith in 2005, but whatever excitement the movie generated was overshadowed by the real-life drama of Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston to move in with Jolie. The excessive tabloid attention didn't stop Pitt from making movies: she made a special appearance in the CGI fantasy Beowulf (2007), lent her voice (as the tigress) in Kung Fu Panda (2008), played an action hero in Wanted (2008) and turned in another Oscar-nominated performance in Clint Eastwood's Changeling.