Biography of Angelina Jolie

Quick Facts

Name

Angelina Jolie

Occupation 

Film Actress, Director

Birth Date 

June 4, 1975 

Education 

Beverly Hills High School

Place of Birth 

Los Angeles, California

AKA

Angelina Jolie

 

Full Name

Angelina Jolie Voight

Angelina Jolie is one of Hollywood's leading actresses, known for movies like Changeling and Salt as much as she is for her relationship with actor Brad Pitt.

Synopsis

Born in Los Angeles, California, on June 4, 1975, Angelina Jolie starred in the HBO biopic Gia before earning an Academy Award for best supporting actress for Girl, Interrupted. Jolie has become one of Hollywood's top marquee names, having starred in movies like Wanted, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Salt and Changeling. She's also directed the film In the Land of Blood and Honey, and is coupled with actor Brad Pitt.

Early Life

Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie Voight was born on June 4, 1975, in Los Angeles, California, to actor Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand. She rose to stardom in the 1990s. She began acting at a young age, studying at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute while in her early teens. Jolie later attended New York University.

Breakthrough Role

In the 1990s, Angelina Jolie became a popular actress. She gave a star-making performance in the 1998 television film Gia based on the short, tragic life of model Gia Marie Carangi, which won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.

Another great dramatic role in Girl, Interrupted (1999) brought Jolie her first Academy Award (for best supporting actress). She has continued to take on a variety of interesting roles, such as an adventurer in the Lara Croft films, a FBI profiler in Taking Lives (2004), an assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) and a neglected, troubled socialite wife in The Good Shepherd (2006).

In 2007, Jolie gave a brilliant performance as Mariane Pearl, the pregnant widow of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, in A Mighty Heart. The film was based on Mariane Pearl's account of her husband's abduction and murder.

Humanitarian Efforts

A devoted humanitarian, Angelina Jolie was made a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency in 2001. She has made headlines for her work to obtain aid for refugees in Cambodia, Darfur and Jordan, to name just a few.
In 2005, Jolie received the Global Humanitarian Action Award from the United Nations Association of the USA for her activism on behalf of refugee rights. She continues to travel the world to drawing attention to global issues.

Recent Roles

In October 2008, Jolie appeared in the Clint Eastwood-directed thriller Changeling. Jolie played Christine Collins, a mother whose son reappears after his kidnapping. Collins is sure the returned boy is not the one to whom she gave birth, and her fight reveals a police conspiracy. In 2009, Jolie received an Oscar nomination for best actress for her role in the film.

The actress went on to earn the lead role in the action-packed Salt (2010), about a CIA agent, Evelyn Salt, who is on the run after being accused of being a Russian spy. That same year, she earned the featured part of Elise Clifton-Ward in The Tourist alongside Johnny Depp. She has since been cast in the title role of Maleficent, slated to be released in 2014, and is scheduled to reprise her role as Evelyn Salt in Salt 2.

Personal Life

Famous for her off-screen romances, Angelina Jolie has been married twice. She married Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller in 1995. The couple divorced in 1999. The following year, Jolie married Academy Award-winning actor Billy Bob Thornton. That union lasted until 2003. Jolie met her next romantic partner, actor Brad Pitt, during the making of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 2004.

In 2002, Angelina Jolie adopted a son from Cambodia and named him Maddox. Three years later, she adopted a daughter, Zahara. In 2005, actor Brad Pitt filed paperwork to adopt both of Jolie's children. The couple's first biological daughter, Shiloh, was born in the African country of Namibia in 2006. Jolie, Pitt and their children had traveled there to avoid the media frenzy that seemed to follow them wherever they went.

In March 2007, Angelina Jolie added a new member to her family. She adopted a 3-year-old boy from a Vietnamese orphanage and named him Pax Thien. Jolie gave birth to twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, on July 12, 2008, in a seaside hospital in southern France. The rights for the first images of the twins were sold to People and Hello! magazines for $14 million—making them the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken.

After the joy of welcoming her third child, Shiloh, into the world came great sadness for Jolie. She experienced a great personal loss in early 2007, when her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian cancer at the age of 56 after fighting the disease for many years.

In May 2013, 37-year-old Jolie announced in a New York Times op-ed article titled "My Medical Choice" that she underwent a double mastectomy in an effort to prevent breast cancer in the future. The actress said she decided to undergo the surgery after learning that she carries a gene known as BRCA1, which increases the risk of both breast and ovarian cancer. "My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman," Jolie stated. "Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could." By late April 2013, Jolie added, she had completed several months of medical procedures, including a double mastectomy and reconstruction surgery, at the Pink Lotus Breast Center in California.
Pitt and Jolie became engaged in 2012. Slipping under the paparazzi radar, they quietly tied the knot in a private ceremony surrounded by their family and friends on August 23, 2014 in France.

Biography of Walt Disney

Quick Facts

Name

Walt Disney

Birth Date 

December 5, 1901

Death Date 

December 15, 1966

Education 

Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, McKinley High School, Chicago Art Institute

Place of Birth 

Chicago, Illinois

Place of Death 

Burbank, California

AKA

Walt Disney

 

Full Name

Walter Elias Disney

Walt Disney was an American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of cartoon films and as the creator of Disneyland.

Synopsis

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in Hermosa, Illinois. He and his brother Roy co-founded Walt Disney Productions, which became one of the best-known motion-picture production companies in the world. Disney was an innovative animator and created the cartoon character Mickey Mouse. He won 22 Academy Awards during his lifetime, and was the founder of theme parks Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

Early Life

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was born on December 5, 1901, in the Hermosa section of Chicago, Illinois. His father was Elias Disney, an Irish-Canadian, and his mother, Flora Call Disney, was German-American. Disney was one of five children, four boys and a girl. He lived most of his childhood in Marceline, Missouri, where he began drawing, painting and selling pictures to neighbors and family friends. In 1911, his family moved to Kansas City, where Disney developed a love for trains. His uncle, Mike Martin, was a train engineer who worked the route between Fort Madison, Iowa, and Marceline. Later, Disney would work a summer job with the railroad, selling snacks and newspapers to travelers.

Disney attended McKinley High School in Chicago, where he took drawing and photography classes and was a contributing cartoonist for the school paper. At night, he took courses at the Chicago Art Institute. When Disney was 16, he dropped out of school to join the army but was rejected for being underage. Instead, he joined the Red Cross and was sent to France for a year to drive an ambulance.

Early Cartoons

When Disney returned from France in 1919, he moved back to Kansas City to pursue a career as a newspaper artist. His brother Roy got him a job at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio, where he met cartoonist Ubbe Eert Iwwerks, better known as Ub Iwerks. From there, Disney worked at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on cutout animation. Around this time, Disney began experimenting with a camera, doing hand-drawn cel animation, and decided to open his own animation business. From the ad company, he recruited Fred Harman as his first employee.

Walt and Harman made a deal with a local Kansas City theater to screen their cartoons, which they called Laugh-O-Grams. The cartoons were hugely popular, and Disney was able to acquire his own studio, upon which he bestowed the same name. Laugh-O-Gram hired a number of employees, including Harman's brother Hugh and Ub Iwerks. They did a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live action and animation, which they called Alice in Cartoonland. By 1923, however, the studio had become burdened with debt, and Disney was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Disney and his brother, Roy, soon pooled their money and moved to Hollywood. Iwerks also relocated to California, and there the three began the Disney Brothers' Studio. Their first deal was with New York distributor Margaret Winkler, to distribute their Alice cartoons. They also invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and contracted the shorts at $1,500 each.
In 1925, Disney hired an ink-and-paint artist named Lillian Bounds. After a brief courtship, the couple married.

A few years later, Disney discovered that Winkler and her husband, Charles Mintz, had stolen the rights to Oswald, along with all of Disney’s animators, except for Iwerks. Right away the Disney brothers, their wives and Iwerks produced three cartoons featuring a new character Walt had been developing called Mickey Mouse. The first animated shorts featuring Mickey were Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, both silent films for which they failed to find distribution. When sound made its way into film, Disney created a third, sound-and-music-equipped short called Steamboat Willie. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, the cartoon was an instant sensation.

Commercial Success

In 1929, Disney created Silly Symphonies, which featured Mickey's newly created friends, including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. One of the most popular cartoons, Flowers and Trees, was the first to be produced in color and to win an Oscar. In 1933, The Three Little Pigs and its title song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a theme for the country in the midst of the Great Depression.
On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, premiered in Los Angeles. It produced an unimaginable $1.499 million, in spite of the Depression, and won a total of eight Oscars. During the next five years, Walt Disney Studios completed another string of full-length animated films, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

In December 1939, a new campus for Walt Disney Studios was opened in Burbank. A setback for the company occurred in 1941, however, when there was a strike by Disney animators. Many of them resigned, and it would be years before the company fully recovered. During the mid-40s, Disney created "packaged features," groups of shorts strung together to run at feature length, but by 1950, he was once again focusing on animated features. Cinderella was released in 1950, followed by Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), a live-action film called Treasure Island (1950), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and 101 Dalmatians (1961). In all, more than 100 features were produced by his studio.

Disney was also among the first to use television as an entertainment medium. The Zorro and Davy Crockett series were extremely popular with children, as was The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show featuring a cast of teenagers known as the Mouseketeers. Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color was a popular Sunday night show, which Disney used to begin promoting his new theme park. Disney's last major success that he produced himself was the motion picture Mary Poppins, which mixed live action and animation.

Disneyland

Disney's $17 million Disneyland theme park opened in 1955. It was a place where children and their families could explore, take rides and meet the Disney characters. In a very short time, the park had increased its investment tenfold, and was entertaining tourists from around the world.

Death

Within a few years of the opening, Disney began plans for a new theme park and Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow in Florida. It was still under construction when, in 1966, Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on December 15, 1966, at the age of 65. Disney was cremated, and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. After his brother's death, Roy carried on the plans to finish the Florida theme park, which opened in 1971 under the name Walt Disney World.