When Angelina Jolie was bombarded with praise for her role in A Mighty Heart in June 2007, America suddenly remembered: Oh, yeah. She’s an actress, too, isn’t she?

She’s appeared in films regularly since 1999, but since 2004 she’s been best-known as a humanitarian baby-collector who trots the globe in search of orphaned children to adopt. She became so strongly associated with that, in fact, that the public forgot she’d also been a home-wrecker, breaking up Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston when she and Pitt worked together on Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

And before THAT, she was best-known for being a semi-creepy bisexual Goth chick who had a thing for blood, and who said she was in love with her brother at the Oscars. She was a nutcase, in other words. Men were turned on by her while simultaneously being terrified of her. And now she’s the acting equivalent of Bono, a professional do-gooder and a responsible citizen of the world.

(more…)