Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie is one of the most closely watched celebrities in the world.  She juggles a busy movie career and humanitarian work while raising a blended family with partner and fellow actor Brad Pitt.

Here latest venture has been to expand from just an actor to being a director, producing her debut effort IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY.

Angelina Jolie returns to the realm of the action movie this summer with WANTED, a film about a secret society of assassins loosely-based on a series of comic books. She stars alongside James McAvoy (Atonement) and Morgan Freeman (The Bucket List). For the role, she had a variety of fake tattoos added around her real ones to give her character even more than she wears in real-life.

When the CGI/animated adaptation of Beowulf opened in November 2007, movie watchers got to see Angelina Jolie naked, dripping with gold liquid, in the role of the mother of the monster/villain Grendel. Well... sort of....

Robert Zemeckis directed this film, which is entirely rendered with CGI. Using motion capture processes, the actors were filmed and then their likenesses and performances were translated via digitally-created recreations. Similar methods were how Andy Serkis portrayed Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and how Bill Nighy was motion-captured for his performance as Davy Jones in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

So, although the onscreen Angie is very sexy and just a touch alien, what you see here is how she appeared on the set and during actual filming. All those little balls are key animation points used by the computer to recreate specific motions and facial expressions.

When the movie GIRL, INTERRUPTED was released, it was really being pushed by the studio as a Winona Ryder film. However Angelina's performance deftly eclipsed Ms. Ryder's and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of volatile patient Lisa Rowe.

This past year, she took on the complex role of widow Mariane Pearl in PLAYING BY HEART, based on Pearl's real-life experiences during and after her news journalist husband Daniel was killed by Islamic extremeists.

Probably the most-discussed action film of Angelina's career is MR. & MRS. SMITH. She plays the wife half of a jaded and bored married couple who don't know each actually works as a secret agent/assasin. Assigned to hit each other (shades of Prizzi's Honor) they actually discover their passion for each other and then have to survive everyone else out to get them.

The action role that really made gamer-geeks everywhere take notice of her was her portrayal of videogame babe Lara Croft.