How Angelina Jolie Has Changed So Much--and Yet Not as Much as It Might Seem

Angelina Jolie: Oscar-winning actress, director, wife, mother, humanitarian, activist. The list goes on, and she would presumably want Mom bumped to the top no matter how long the list gets.

The movie star, who celebrates her 41st birthday today, has been in our orbit for going on three decades and, at first glance, you might think that Jolie is completely unrecognizable, inside and out, from the days of goth red carpets and being so in love you want to just kill the guy.

To be sure, the mother of six has streamlined her style choices and settled on what suits her to a tee. But the fire that palpably burned within, and that made Jolie such an intriguing, magnetic celebrity, is still there, along with her tattoos. It's just…

Busy keeping other things warm.

That energy, once devoted to experimentation and what always seems in the moment to be an interminable search for passion and purpose, has been redirected toward her husband, children and passion projects, be they on or off camera.

Jolie admitted to The Guardian last year after turning 40 that "being in the everyday" and "staying still" weren't easy for her.

"Because I've always been very… I'm a bit on fire, inside," she said.

Jolie has credited Pitt with helping her slow down "to kind of get it right, to relax into the strength of my family and the love."

Because really, while people may mature over the years, they don't change that much. They do, however, in a best case scenario, find a way to utilize their personalities in a way that leads to the best life possible.

Can we say mission accomplished for Jolie?

Even after starring in the heartbreaking TV movie Gia and getting rave reviews (and a Golden Globe) for her efforts, she didn't fancy herself some big star. In fact, she may have been more self-doubting and worried about her future than ever before.

"So I'd be working and doing interviews, and then going home by myself and not knowing if I'd ever be in a relationship or be really good in my marriage or be a good mother one day or if I'd ever be ... I don't know, complete as a woman. It was a really sad time," she recalled to Rolling Stone in 1999, when she was 24.
Angelina Jolie, Johnny Lee MillerJim Smeal/WireImage
She added, remembering how she and first ex-husband Jonny Lee Miller were also breaking up around that time, "I just wasn't whole as a person, I guess, and now I know that you never are completely, and it doesn't matter."

Jolie was just months away from winning her first Oscar, for Girl, Interrupted, when she gave that interview, but she was still widely considered at the time to be this intense, dark, ragingly sexy but strange actress. And yet she proved refreshingly eloquent and introspective as well—a glimpse of the person who would go on to write about her own double mastectomy and oophorectomy.

Explaining the tiny window tattoo on the small of her back to RS she said, "It's because wherever I am, I always find myself looking out the window, wanting to be somewhere else."


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