Angelina Jolie - The Actress

When I did my Angelina Jolie versus Megan Fox Hub, I never expected the kind of "Internet Love" Angelina would get.
Really, I figured it would be more heavily weighed towards Megan, but that wasn't the case at all.

One point I made on that Hub was that Angelina seems to get a lot of coverage in celebrity news and gossip for her adoptions, charities, weight, relationship with Brad Pitt, rivalries with Jennifer Aniston and Megan Fox etc and not a lot of praise for her acting.

It's understandable though I guess.
Angelina is sexy in a way that people really can't describe.
Her allure seems to bypass gender barriers quite easily.

But like I said, even though she's a sex symbol, Angelina is an actress.
She's done over 35 films and won and been nominated for Golden Globe Awards, Academy Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, People's Choice Awards and Saturn Awards.

So let's take a look at Angelina's acting, from the beginning up to now...

Angelina appeared in her very first movie Lookin’ to Get Out back in 1982 at the tender age of seven.
The film was written by Al Schwartz (who wrote and directed a lot of TV sitcoms from the The Jackie Gleason Show all the way up to Chico and the Man) and her father Jon Voight.
Angelina appears as Jon's character's daughter "Tosh" near the end of the film.

Since she was only seven, Angelina took a break from acting and didn't appear on the big screen again until 1993's Cyborg 2.
She played the part of Casella "Cash" Reese in a film that was part of a trilogy that started with Cyborg (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme) and ended with the direct to video Cyborg 3: The Recycler.
Angelina didn't appear in Cyborg 3, her part was played by Khrystyne Haje (Head of the Class).

In 1995, she starred in the thriller,Without Evidence, with Scott Plank (Melrose Place), but that wasnt the big role that year.
The breakout role in 1995 was in the cult hit Hackers.
She got a lot of attention for her role as Kate Libby also known as Acid Burn.
Her co-star in the film was Jonny Lee Miller, who Angelina later married on March 28th, 1996.

And speaking of 1996, in that year Angelina had three movies come out.
The road movie Mojave Moon (with Danny Aiello, Anne Archer, Michael Biehn, Alfred Molina and Peter MacNicol), the romantic comedy film, Love Is All There Is (with Lainie Kazan, Joseph Bologna and Barbara Carrera) and Foxfire, which was based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, where Angelina met model and actress Jenny Shimizu.

In 1997 Angelina turned to TV and really got noticed.
She appeared in the TV movies True Women and George Wallace.
And while True Women really didnt do well, George Wallace more than made up for that.
For her role as Cornelia Wallace, the second wife of Governor George C. Wallace, Jr., Angelina won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series/Miniseries/TV Movie, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie.

But while she did a couple of TV movies, she also had one theatrical release, Playing God (with David Duchovny, Timothy Hutton and the awesome Peter Stormare).
The movie was a flop which didnt help Angelina's or David Duchovny's careers.

In 1998, Angelina again turned towards TV and scored big again.
She appeared in the HBO film Gia, about the life of supermodel Gia Carangi.
Angelina used method acting for this role and poured everything she had into it, leaving her drained both physically and emotionally.
But it paid off.
She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a TV Movie or Miniseries, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie.

Gia took so much out of Angelina though, she took a break from acting and enrolled in New York University to study film making and also attended writing classes.
NYU wasn't a bad choice as the school has produced nineteen Academy Award winners and nine Emmy Award winners.

Even though she took a short break, she still managed to appear in three more films in 1998.
Hell's Kitchen (with Rosanna Arquette, William Forsythe, Mekhi Phifer, and Johnny Whitworth), Playing by Heart (with Jon Stewart, Sean Connery and Gillian Anderson among others) and the comedy drama Pushing Tin (with John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett).
Even though none of these films were huge hits, Angelina still managed to get a National Board of Review Award for Breakthrough Performance for her role as Joan in Playing by Heart.

In 1999, Angelina appeared in The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington.
Even though the critics didn't seem to care for the film, it grossed $151 million worldwide.

But Angelina's next film, released in 2000, made up for being dissed by the critics.
Girl, Interrupted starred Angelina, Winona Ryder, Clea DuVall, the late Brittany Murphy, Vanessa Redgrave and Whoopi Goldberg.
Despite the film's star being Winona Ryder, Angelina's performance stole the show.
For her role as Lisa Rowe, Angelina won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture and she was nominated for the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 2000, Angelina starred in the remake of the 1974 cult hit, Gone in 60 Seconds.
The movie was the typical summer blockbuster type, and Angelina played the role of Sara "Sway" Wayland, the old girlfriend of Nicolas Cage's character, Randall "Memphis" Raines.
Although Angelina didn't rack up any nominations, the film itself earned over $237 million gross in worldwide box office.

And even though Gone in 60 Seconds made a lot of money, it was nothing compared to what awaited Angelina in 2001....