Born in Los Angeles, California, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. She is the niece of Chip Taylor, sister of James Haven and the god-daughter of Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell. On her father's side, Jolie is of Slovak and German descent, and on her mother's side she is French Canadian and is said to be part Iroquois, Voight claims Bertrand is "not seriously Iroquois," and they merely said it to enhance his ex-wife's exotic background.

After her parents' separation in 1976, Jolie and her brother were raised by their mother, who abandoned her acting ambitions and moved with them to Palisades, New York. As a child Jolie regularly saw movies with her mother and later explained that this had inspired her interest in acting; she had not been influenced by her father. When she was eleven years old, the family moved back to Los Angeles and Jolie decided she wanted to act and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she trained for two years and appeared in several stage productions. She later recalled her time as a student at Beverly Hills High School (later Moreno High School), and her feeling of isolation among the children of some of the area's more affluent families. Jolie's mother survived on a more modest income, and Jolie often wore second-hand clothes. She was teased by other students who also targeted her for her distinctive features, for being extremely thin, and for wearing glasses and braces. Her self-esteem was further diminished when her initial attempts at modeling proved unsuccessful. She started to cut herself; later commenting, "I collected knives and always had certain things around. For some reason, the ritual of having cut myself and feeling the pain, maybe feeling alive, feeling some kind of release, it was somehow therapeutic to me." At the age of 14, she dropped out of her acting classes and dreamed of becoming a funeral director. During this period, she wore black, dyed her hair purple and went out moshing with her live-in boyfriend.Two years later, after the relationship had ended, she rented an apartment above a garage a few blocks from her mother's home. returned to theatre studies and graduated from high school, though in recent times she has referred to this period with the observation, "I am still at heart—and always will be—just a punk kid with tattoos".

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