Angelina Jolie: Facts only her biggest fans will know

We've collected some surprising facts about Angelina Jolie, one of the world's most famous actresses! Only the most hardcore fans will know ALL of them; click further to learn some fun tidbits about Angelina Jolie!

Born on the 4th of June, 1975, Angelina Jolie has been in the spotlight since birth. Her parents Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand were both successful actors, so she appeared in photos in the press from a very young age. Here we see her with her father when Angelina was only four hours old!

Growing up with actor parents, it is no surprise that Angelina Jolie made her screen debut at the young age of 7. Angelina appeared in 'Lookin' to Get Out' alongside her father in 1982.

Growing up, Angelina's favorite kind of animal was the reptile. She even had a lizard and a few snakes as pets, and she still loves them to this day. In an interview on the website MovieWeb, the actress spoke about working with snakes during the film 'Alexander', saying, "I love ‘em, I suppose I like the thing that everybody doesn’t. I think they’re magnificent creatures..."

Angelina didn't get into acting on a regular basis right away. Instead, starting at age 14, she began her career in modeling.

We would never guess it, but Angelina Jolie is actually a natural blonde!
"My natural color is dark blonde. But when I was four or five, my mother dyed my hair dark brown, and she decided to keep it that way. And I stuck with that," Jolie told the German magazine Das Neue.

Angelina was not the It girl in school. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar, Jolie said, "At school, I wasn't that popular person; I was a punk."

Angelina Jolie and her older brother James Haven have always been very close. Since they didn't have a good relationship with their father, John Voight, the siblings decided together to drop their last name, 'Voight.' They chose to use their middle names as their last names instead.

While it is good to have a close relationship with your siblings, Angelina and her brother James were known for being EXTREMELY close. They often appeared at events together in the late '90s and early 2000 and were photographed hanging all over each other and even kissing on the lips. Angelina even had to fight the press over rumors that she was having an affair with James.

Angelina is a woman of many skills. In the year 2004, she earned her pilot's license and can fly small private planes. Jolie owns a Cirrus SR22 and occasionally takes it out for a spin. In an interview with People Magazine, Jolie said she mainly learned to fly to impress her son Maddox.
"Every time Mad sees a plane, he’s amazed… (So I thought) if I could actually fly a plane by the time he’s 4, I’ll be like Superman to him."

Angelina and her kids are not on social media. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's 'Today' in 2018, Jolie said, "I'm not on Facebook, and none of my children are on Facebook. Nobody's even asked to be."

Angelina may be a global superstar now, but her first film role as an adult was pretty trashy. In 1993 she landed a role in 'Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow,' eighteen-year-old Jolie played a cyborg designed to explode when she has intercourse. Jolie has said in interviews that she did not enjoy the role and felt sick after seeing 'Cyborg 2.'

Angelina Jolie has done a lot of charity work in different places worldwide, but she was really gone above and beyond in Cambodia. So much so that in 2005, the King of Cambodia made her an official citizen of the country in appreciation of her humanitarian work.

In February of 2013, Angelina underwent a voluntary double mastectomy. Jolie had discovered that she was the carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation that practically guaranteed that she would develop breast cancer one day. So, she decided to undergo the aggressive procedure of mastectomy to lower her risk of both breast and ovarian cancer; the latter took her mother's life.

Pictured: Jolie with her mother, Marcheline Bertrand.

Jolie wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about her decision to get a preventative mastectomy. "Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and minimize the risk as much as I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy," she wrote. "I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex." Two years later, Jolie also had a preventive salpingo-oophorectomy to avoid ovarian cancer, which she was also at risk of developing.

To get approved by the producers for the role of Lara Croft in the action film 'Tomb Raider,' Angelina Jolie had to undergo extensive drug testing. The actress had earned a reputation as a "wild child," and the producers were worried enough about her behavior to make drug testing a condition for her to play the role.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Paramount’s then-president John Goldwyn said, "We were sufficiently worried (about Jolie) that we obliged her to undergo random drug tests – and not just urine tests but also blood tests." The Reporter also wrote that Jolie was eager to get the role and passed all the tests.

Growing up, Angelina always felt quite different compared to her peers. Her childhood crush gives us an example of how unique she was...she had a crush on Spock from 'Star Trek!' In an interview in 1999 on 'The Daily Show,' Jolie revealed that she was strongly attracted to Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy.

Photo: NBC

Before she was a major movie star, Angelina Jolie made appearances in quite a few music videos in the 90s. She appeared in The Rolling Stones' video 'Anybody Seen My Baby,' The Lemonheads' video for 'It's About Time,' the Meat Loaf video 'Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through,' and Antonello Venditti's video for the song 'Alta Marea,' an Italian cover of Crowded House's 'Don't Dream It's Over.'

Angelina has said that she got her first daggers at 11 or 12 years old and that she now has an impressive collection. In an interview with ABC News, Jolie said, "I've always been fascinated by other cultures and history and honor and fight and so they … they are not shiny, brand-new sharp knives from the store. They're antique beautiful knives from other countries, and they are locked in a case so my son does not touch them."

Photo: Screenshot from the film

Angelina is known for doing her own stunts. In an interview with BBC News in 2010, she spoke about how she trusts her team to ensure the stunts are safe for her to perform. In the movie 'Salt,' the actress performed 99% of her own stunts, and for those which she simply couldn't perform, stunt double Eunice Huthart filled in for her.