ANGELINA Jolie glides past me into the room. Our encounter is mid-way through the Cannes Film Festival, the day after Jack Black, her co-star from new animated movie Kung Fu Panda, blurted out to the world’s press that she is expecting twins this August. Though looking heavily pregnant in a white maternity dress, Jolie moves with grace and is evidently deep into her Earth Mother phase. Her new arrivals will make six children in all, adding to three adopted and one biological child she alread “I went through a lot of my youth really thinking I was never going to be stable enough or calm enough and be able to give enough of myself as a parent,” says the 33-year-old actress. “I always loved children, but I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready enough to be a good mum. And I took it very seriously. But I always wanted to adopt. What surprised me is I never planned on having children biologically – I was dead set on just adopting. That felt right to me and I had no maternal desire to have children. But that changes when you meet somebody you love.” 

Since she and Pitt hooked up in 2005, the tabloid press has drooled at every move made by ‘Brangelina’. Having already adopted the now six-year-old Maddox in 2002, after a trip to Cambodia, Jolie took in two more children – the Ethiopian-born Zahara Marley, three, and Vietnam-born Pax Thien, four – as well as giving birth to Shiloh Nouvel, now two.

It’s a far cry from her early days as a self-confessed “punk kid”. Taking acting classes in her teens at the Lee Strasberg Institute before embarking on a brief modelling career, she swiftly developed a reputation as Hollywood’s bad girl du jour, known for her knife collection, penchant for S&M, and the ever-growing number of tattoos.

She married her first husband, Jonny Lee Miller, whom she met on the set of 1995′s cyber-thriller Hackers, in a white shirt with his name daubed in her blood on the back. When she and Billy Bob Thornton wed, they wore vials of each other’s blood around their necks. Just last week Thornton stated in the press that her liaison with Pitt was her “high school phase”, that she had regressed to “dating the quarterback of the football team”. What Thornton fails to take into account is the other possibility: perhaps his ex-wife has matured since they starred together in 1999′s Pushing Tin. “I was always considered a wild person and there was a part of me that didn’t feel like I was also a thinker. So I had insecurity about that. But I feel more confident now, finding my own level.”

Much of this came as she took on a role as a UNHCR goodwill ambassador, travelling to Sierra Leone and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It led to her and Pitt recently being placed at number 21 on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People. “I’m sure I’m on a lot of other weird lists too,” she jokes. “But that means a lot to us and is an important aspect in our lives, and I’m glad we’re able to accomplish things with what we’ve set out to do.”

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Jolie and Pitt moved their brood to Louisiana, so the architecture-obsessed Pitt could help commission 20 environment-friendly houses with Global Green USA in the region.

Now ensconced in a $3.5m house in the French Quarter, if there’s a problem, it’s that Jolie is in danger of becoming better known for her ‘rainbow’ family and her philanthropic work than for her acting. Since winning an Oscar in 2000 for her asylum inmate in Girl, Interrupted, her career choices have largely regressed. Playing the adventure-seeking video game icon Lara Croft might have seemed like a good idea, but both Tomb Raider and its 2003 sequel were woeful. Meanwhile, aid worker tale Beyond Borders was never even released. Only the vacuous espionage action movie Mr And Mrs Smith, the film on which she met Pitt while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston, kept her star afloat, taking almost $500m worldwide.

This is not the risk-taking Jolie of old, when she won a Golden Globe for playing the Aids-ravaged supermodel Gia Marie Carangi in TV movie Gia. Lest we forget, Jolie – the daughter of actor John Voight and a graduate of the infamous Beverly Hills High, where many stars were schooled – is pure Hollywood. Last year she attempted two more serious projects – playing journalist Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart and Matt Damon’s spouse in Robert De Niro’s CIA drama The Good Shepherd. Yet she ended it by playing Grendel’s mother in the digitally realised version of Beowulf, a role that required little more than for her to appear voluptuous.

Now she has two new films that are equally vapid. The first is the ludicrous action movie Wanted. She plays The Fox, a gun-toting assassin who recruits James McAvoy’s office drone to join her in a secret group of trained killers called The Fraternity. “She is an assassin but she believes she kills bad people,” says Jolie. “She does it with a conscience.” While she’s an old hand at action movies, did she think first-timer McAvoy would make the grade? “We think of him as this sweet fun guy – and he is – but he’s also from Scotland and that’s a tough place. You gotta be pretty tough when you’re Scottish.”

Recalling her earlier work as a car thief in Gone In Sixty Seconds, Wanted may satisfy pubescent boys, but it will do little to win her plaudits. Kung Fu Panda, a computer-animated adventure set in China, isn’t much better. Jolie voices Tigress – another equally appropriate animal equivalent after playing The Fox – who competes with Po (Jack Black), a panda obsessed by martial arts. “As two of my kids are from Asia, when I found out that this one was going to be set there, and it was going to deal with history, culture and morals, I was excited. And I got to be a cool tiger, which impressed my children.”

Having already lent her voice to the animated Shark Tale, Jolie is making movies for her kids as much as for herself. “What’s important to us in the house is culture – even the colour of the children in the cartoons,” she says. “There’s still not a Disney princess that’s African. It’s very difficult because our daughter is getting into princesses right now, and it upsets us. We found the Brandy movie where she played Cinderella. These are things that we’re very conscious of. It’s why I love this film. It’s perfect for my children. It deals with a lot of issues. It even deals with being an orphan.”

While her own relationship with her father has remained strained at best, after he once went on national television and proclaimed she had “serious mental problems”, family seems to infiltrate everything Jolie does. Her other film in Cannes, due for release early next year, deals with this very issue. Directed by Clint Eastwood, Changeling sees Jolie play a true-life 1920s single mother whose child is kidnapped. “It was a really complicated film,” she says. “It was a really upsetting film. It was very emotional, but Clint managed to help me get through it without cracking up. He’s just a great director. He’s the leader you hope for in any aspect of life. I tend to start gushing when I talk about him.”

If this role represents a return to form for Jolie, she seems to care much less about her profession now. “I think I’ll be working a lot less as I get older,” she says. “Films that I want to do are few and far between.” For the moment, the only project she has considering doing is Atlas Shrugged, an adaptation of the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand about a railroad heiress struggling to keep her business alive in an increasingly corrupt society. “Ideally I’d like to not go to work within the next year,” she adds. “I haven’t read a script in a year. I’m not looking for more and I’m very happy to be home.”

Wanted opens on June 25. Kung Fu Panda opens on July 4