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Mother Angleina Jolie

What is Angelina Jolie, Hollywood's top-dollar goddess, doing in a low-budget, post-9/11 drama by a British director known for controversial political films? The question was on everyone's lips when Jolie and her partner, Brad Pitt, arrived in Cannes last month to a firestorm of flashbulbs.

The film is Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, a harrowing account of the real-life kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (played by Dan Futterman) in Pakistan in 2002. Angleina Jolie is at its centre as Pearl's pregnant wife, Mariane, trying to find out who is holding Danny and how she can get him back alive. It is a performance, said most critics after the film festival premiere, that proves Angleina Jolie can act as well as pout - but some remained sceptical.

After all, with her much-publicised "rainbow family" - including three adopted children from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam, plus the daughter she had with Pitt last year - and her conspicuous ambassadorial work for the UN Refugee Agency, Jolie seems to be trying to prove she is more than one half of Hollywood's most glamorous couple.

Produced by Pitt, the movie does a neat job of recasting her as a heavyweight actress with serious humanitarian credentials. Could this be her way of proving that she, too, has a mighty heart?

The fact that Jolie arrives at our meeting alone - looking stunning in a black lace Moschino cocktail dress - speaks volumes for her self-possession. Unlike most Hollywood stars, Angleina Jolie does not employ a personal publicist and is happy to answer questions candidly. She is, unsurprisingly, effusive about Mariane Pearl, on whose memoir the film is based.

"She is just an extraordinary woman," she tells me. "She's had a very full life and handles everything with immense dignity and grace. She and Danny were so open to other cultures and other people. She's nutty, a great mom and a great woman."

Angleina Jolie seems to see in Mariane a kindred spirit - and it's the "great mom" aspect that she keeps returning to. Now 32, she is keen to stress that motherhood is of more importance to her than maintaining the Brangelina brand. "By the time the kids are old enough to really understand all this, hopefully we will be less in the public eye," she says. "We will do fewer films, we will not be that couple."

It was Mariane's plight as a mother-to-be, she says, that really touched her. "I had just been through pregnancy and I was highly aware of how beautiful that time should be for a woman. For her to suffer as much as she did and then to have no self-pity is just extraordinary. I [made] a great friend during this film."

Adding to the scepticism, there has been outrage from black groups in America that Angleina Jolie should play Mariane, who is of mixed Afro-Cuban and Dutch race. Allegedly, the actress wore make-up to darken her skin - this has not been confirmed - and the film has been cited as an example of Hollywood discriminating against black actresses and is accused of obscuring the Pearls' interracial marriage.

She's clearly aware of the potential criticism, and those regarding Pitt's involvement, too. "I was very nervous about this film, because having your partner producing may sound like a good idea, but it can also make the pressure much harder. To do right by him - and by Mariane - became a pressure that I lost sleep over."

In the event, Angleina Jolie's performance satisfied Mariane Pearl herself and Jolie's authentic rawness in the part goes some way to dismissing the idea that the film is her vanity project.

Sporting a wig of short black curls, a fluid French accent and - five months after giving birth herself - a pregnancy bump, she adapted well to Winterbottom's fast, hand-held film-making style, already seen to such powerful effect in Road to Guantanamo.

She is cool and collected throughout, which makes her shrieks at the news of Danny's death all the more heartbreaking. Jolie's howls of despair alone in the bedroom morph in the next scene into her howls of pain in the delivery room of a hospital where she gives birth to her son, Adam.

"I couldn't get my head round how to play the scene," she recalls. "I felt it would be indecent to ask Mariane to tell me exactly how she received the news or how she cried. We all felt horribly sad the night we filmed it. A man was killed in such a brutal way and this little boy we had all met on the set had lost his dad. So those sounds sort of happened organically."

Angleina Jolie needed a bit more help with the birthing scene, she explains. Like many Hollywood mothers, Jolie had a Caesarian when she gave birth to her daughter, Shiloh, a year ago last May.

"Michael [the director] had to try to explain labour to me because he was with his wife when she had children. It was very funny having a bunch of men explaining how to scream at the top of my lungs in a quiet floor of a real hospital in India."

It has been an emotional 12 months for Jolie, however you look at it. The death of her mother, Micheline Bertrand, from cancer earlier this year left her distraught. Bertrand and Jolie's father, the actor Jon Voight, separated when she was one, and Jolie and her brother James Haven were brought up by her mother.

She attributes her worryingly thin figure to the trauma she has gone through. "Someone saying to me that I'm thin is not a compliment," she says.

Her mother was clearly an inspiration. "Both my parents were very focused on charity and I was always raised by my mom to see the joy she had in doing things for others," she says, as if to stress that her benevolent globe-trotting is a natural continuation of her own upbringing, rather than a way of assuaging Hollywood guilt or drawing attention to herself.

Angleina Jolie remains estranged from her father; the two haven't been in contact since 2002, when Voight said on US television that he wanted her to "get help" for "serious mental problems". "I am hoping my relationship with my father will be more private in future," Jolie says. "We both wish the best for each other and we'll try to start communicating in some way."

Acting was always in Angleina Jolie's blood. Voight, of course, was a major film star when she was born, Bertrand was also an actress, and Jolie's brother, two years her senior, studied film-making.

She began studying acting at the age of 11 at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York, having made her film debut at the age of five in the 1980 comedy Lookin' to Get Out, with her father.

Her teen years were spent acting in music videos and modelling, but she returned to the big screen in the long forgotten Cyborg II: Glass Shadows when she was 18 in 1993, moving on to cyber-thriller Hackers (1995) with young British actor Jonny Lee Miller - and a brief marriage to him from 1996 to 1999.

Her career took off in the late 1990s with roles in small films such as Foxfire and Playing By Heart, and two notable TV performances in George Wallace and Gia, for which she won back-to-back Golden Globes. By 1999, when she won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, Angleina Jolie was a tabloid legend, making headlines for her unpredictable behaviour, penchant for tattoos and revelations about her bisexuality. Her marriage to the equally eccentric Billy Bob Thornton in 2000 sealed her fate as a media icon, not exactly quelled by the fact that the two carried vials of one another's blood around their necks.

The couple separated in 2002, and Jolie was by then starring in major blockbusters such as Gone in 60 Seconds and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which established her arguably as the first female action star.

After shooting Tomb Raider in Cambodia, Jolie made trips to the hotspots of Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Pakistan, and was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2002, she adopted a seven-month-old Cambodian orphan, whom she named Maddox. Then in 2004, she stepped in for Nicole Kidman in the action thriller Mr and Mrs Smith and met Brad Pitt. The romance between the two was downplayed while Pitt extricated himself from his marriage to Jennifer Aniston.

The pair's bond soon became obvious and Pitt started accompanying Jolie on her missions to Third World countries.

They adopted Zahara from an Ethiopian orphanage in 2005, and had their biological child, Shiloh, last year, before earlier this year adopting a three-year-old Vietnamese orphan whom they named Pax.

Angleina Jolie loves talking about her children and their backgrounds and encourages them to remain loyal to their origins (Pax and Maddox are both regularly visited by Vietnamese and Cambodian women to keep up their native languages). She says that Pitt's parents have been very welcoming of all the children. "When I first met them, I came in with two adopted children from other countries and I didn't know how they were going to be. But they are equally loving with them."

So how many more are the Jolie-Pitts planning to adopt? "In our home it is all about how much we balance, making sure that everybody has individual time. We never want to have so many kids that we can't do that."

In the meantime, Angleina Jolie hasn't stopped working on movies. After A Mighty Heart, she will appear in the action-adventure Wanted - opposite James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman - which she completed this summer, as the voice of the Queen of the Darkness in animated fantasy Beowulf, and under the direction of Clint Eastwood in The Changeling - the true story of a mother whose son was kidnapped in 1920s Los Angeles.

"I take films very seriously," she says. "It's just that at the end of the day, when I die, I feel that the more significant contribution to have made would be to save a life or change a law that's going to affect people and their children and their country and their rights in the future.

"I want to raise children who will be good people and be a positive influence in this world. I do love being an artist but it's not the core of who I am. I would say being a mother comes first."

• A Mighty Heart opens on 21 September.

• IS IT justifiable censure, or just plain jealousy? Angelina Jolie is beautiful, sexy and intelligent with a successful movie career, four young children and one of the most lusted-after men in the world on her arm, yet public criticism of her charity work and choice of film roles is growing, to the extent that it cannot be ignored.

When she was cast in the role of Mariane Pearl for A Mighty Heart, black rights groups and some black actors, including Thandie Newton, expressed shock that a white woman was chosen to play someone of Afro-Cuban/Dutch descent. It is rumoured that her skin was darkened with make-up for the role, although the film's creators have denied this, saying that her dark complexion is down to "lighting". Jolie has said of the controversy: "I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles [for black actors], but I think they've picked the wrong example here."

Angleina Jolie has been a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for six years, and her work has taken her all over the world. She donates one-third of her salary to charity, but is accused of being uninformed, a mere "celebrity tourist".

In addition, a series of PR gaffes surrounding the release of A Mighty Heart have generated a flood of negative publicity for the actress. From her lawyers trying to force journalists to sign a contract before interviewing her, saying they would not ask any personal questions (despite the film examining the issue of press freedom), to her staff trying to ban Fox journalists from covering the film's premiere, the blunders have portrayed Jolie in exactly the role she wishes to avoid: a diva.

In her personal life, Angleina Jolie cannot escape the endless gossip that she is on the cusp of a split from Pitt, the latest in a long line of rumours being that she is furious that Pitt's mother, Jane, and his ex-wife, Jennifer Aniston, remain close, while Jolie's own relationship with Jane remains hostile. And despite constant reiteration that her most important role is as a mother, she came in for heavy criticism when she suggested that she felt more for her adopted children than for her only biological child, Shiloh. She said: "I think I feel so much more for Madd and Zee because they're survivors, they came through so much. Shiloh seemed so privileged from the moment she was born. I have less inclination to feel for her."