The 39-year-old actress-and-director - who has children Maddox, 13, Pax, 10, Zahara, nine, Shiloh, eight, and six-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne with husband Brad Pitt - takes her work everywhere and says the family’s base in the south of France is “perfectly situated” for wherever she needs to go with either her movie career on her role as a United Nations (UN) special envoy.
She said: “I’m not very good at relaxing. I can’t stay put. I read, write, negotiate films, I carry my office around with me.
“[Our home in France] is close to European cities, but also to Africa and the Middle East. To all the theatres of operations where my United Nations work obliges me to go. LA is clearly too far from all that.”
Jolie was left devastated in 2007 when her beloved mother Marcheline Bertrand died of cancer but she still feels her mom’s presence when she is with her children.
She explained to France’s Marie Claire magazine: “I feel in contact with my mother when I look at my children.
“I can feel her influence over me then. I see that my way of raising them resembles the way she raised my brother and I.
“It’s more apparent with my daughters Shiloh and Vivienne. Therefore, yes, my mother is there, present in this influence, all the time.
The ‘Maleficent’ actress admires “softness and strength” in other women, attributes she always appreciated in her mother.
She said: “She was very soft but could move mountains for her kids.
“That’s something I always admire in women: that mix of softness and strength. She was half Indian, and I remember that as a small girl, she took me to a dinner for Amnesty International.
“She always tried to understand the complexity of the world. She had a great heart which was sensitive to the world’s violence.”
