Angelina the angel

'I'm dating everyone apparently - I get around,' laughs Angelina Jolie, with more than a hint of exasperation. 'But the truth is, I haven't had sex for a year.'

Recent rumours have linked her with, if not quite everyone, Nicolas Cage, Kiefer Sutherland and, most recently, both Kylie Minogue's boyfriend, actor Olivier Martinez, and Uma Thurman's husband, Ethan Hawke. Jolie, Martinez and Hawke are making a film together in Montreal - Taking Lives - and insist, as is always the case, that they are just good friends.

Certainly, sitting here now, she sounds totally serious about her period of celibacy. 'It's been a long time but I'm fine,' she says. 'I feel happier than I've ever been.'

But it was just three years ago that 28-year-old Jolie was insisting the same thing. She'd eloped to Las Vegas in May 2000 and married Billy Bob Thornton, although few - including his then long-term girlfriend Laura Dern - knew they were even dating.

The pair adopted a Cambodian child, Maddox, now two. The whole episode simply served to reinforce her wild child image. Four years previously, at the age of 20, she'd married Jonny Lee Miller, her co-star in one of her first films, Hackers. Famously, at the wedding she wrote his name in her own blood across the back of her shirt.

But Jolie does exude a radiant happiness on this muggy New York day. She is wearing a paper-thin cream top, black trousers and little make-up. She looks softer and more beautiful in person than in her most recent guise as Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider movies, the second of which, The Cradle Of Life, explodes onto our screens next week.

The first film was panned by the critics, and rightly so, but took more than £80 million at the American box office. The sequel is better, though Jolie deserves something meatier. But Lara has made Jolie a household name and, she says, set her on the right path. 'I totally believe in destiny. I'm not overly romantic but I do believe if we listened to our hearts, we would all be living the lives that we should be living. Nobody wanted me to do the first Tomb Raider film. Everyone said I was crazy. But if I'd never done it and gone to Cambodia to film, I might never have known Maddox.' Jolie went back to Cambodia in 2001 to visit an orphanage and find a baby to adopt. Maddox was three months old when they met and it took four months for all the red tape to be cleared before she could take him to the US.

'Mad has changed me completely,' she adds. 'I'm selfless now. I understand love and life in a different way. So long as he's safe everything else is fine.'

There was nothing particularly safe or stable about Anjelina Jolie Voight's early years. Her father, famed American actor Jon Voight, gave her the middle name to use professionally should she so desire, and then promptly split from her mother, part native-American former model Marcheline Bertrand. Voight was not a regular presence in Jolie's life but she nonetheless took acting lessons from legendary US coach Lee Strasberg from the age of 11 and later studied film at New York University. She modelled, starred in music videos and made her first serious impression in 1998's Gia.

Playing top model Gia Carangi, who wrestled with heroin addiction and eventually died of Aids, Jolie was fearless, naked in every sense, and caused a sensation. The role won Jolie the first of her three Golden Globes.