Angelina Jolie’s kids are off playing nearby. “They’re with their dad, actually. Around here somewhere,” she says with a wave of her hand. “And I’m going to hook up with them in a couple of hours. When I’ve done this.” This sounds like a perfectly normal domestic agenda, until you remind yourself that we are sitting in a cabana in the grounds of one of the fanciest hotels on the French Riviera, and that the play-day father in question happens to be Brad Pitt. Thus, outside the front gates of this imposingly posh hotel, a posse of paparazzi the size of a small army await the couple’s movements. Indeed, such is their star power that just down the road, Cannes, a town geared to the presence of movie actors, seems to take to the streets and hold its collective breath when the couple sweep in later that evening, cocooned inside a motorcade of limos. For now, though, there’s an interview to navigate, and then it’s family time.

“Oh, Brad’s a great father, a very hands-on father,” she smiles. “We’re very hands-on parents, believe me.” Together they form Brangelina, a celebrity soap opera that straddles the globe from Pakistan and India, where they were based as she made her latest film, A Mighty Heart, to Pittsburgh and Peterborough. Everybody knows all about them, don’t they? If you were to follow the American tabloids, there’s a version of their lives that is played out in relentless weekly episodes; there are “stories” – speculation mingled with half-truths and, frankly, rubbish – of rows, her “dramatic” weight loss, and petty jealousies about exes.

His ex, of course, is Jennifer Aniston, the girl-next-door type who lost Pitt to the altogether more exotic and vampish Jolie. Hers is Billy Bob Thornton, of which more later. But to read such material – one report even detailed the number of hotdogs Brad ordered for the kids and how many had ketchup (three) – leaves you briefly wondering if they really are constantly at each other’s throats, why nobody wanted mustard or onions and, mostly, how on earth anybody could live in such a goldfish bowl. This is celebrity watching gone nuts. “I don’t see those magazines and I don’t watch those TV programmes,” says Jolie. “I really don’t know about that stuff, and I don’t want to know. It’s funny. Sometimes somebody will reference something as if I understand what the rumour has been for the last month, and I have no idea what they are talking about. Mostly, I’m sure, it’s nonsense.”

The woman before us today, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana white wraparound dress, is undeniably beautiful. Her brown hair is swept back from that remarkable face and those extraordinary lips are free from lipstick and as full as ever. (One story had them “disappearing”, like a magician’s rabbit.) She does, though, look thinner than the last time I interviewed her some two years ago, but certainly not the anorexic waif others have made her out to be. She tells me that life is “great”, although she is still grieving from the loss of her mother, French actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died in January this year, aged just 56, after a long battle with ovarian cancer.

“I am my mother’s daughter,” she says. “Very much so. My love of children, my values, caring about what goes on in the world, all of that comes from her. She was the most wonderful woman and a fantastic role model for me. I miss her terribly every day. I try to raise my children the way that my mother raised me. I didn’t really have a father around.” Her father is actor Jon Voight, who married Bertrand when she was 21 and a rising star. They had two children – Angelina has an older brother, James Haven – but were divorced when their daughter was just three, and while Jolie is a second-generation Hollywood star, her relatively modest home life apparently left her feeling isolated from her altogether more privileged schoolmates at Beverly Hills High School.

As a teenager, Jolie took up modelling and appeared in pop videos, but quickly broke into the movie business. Indeed she did some of her best work early on in her career, playing a supermodel who dies of Aids in Gia (which won her a Golden Globe), and a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted (which in 2000 won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Her acting credentials established early on, Jolie has always been happy to combine more commercial films – Foxfire, The Bone Collector, the Tomb Raider movies – with more serious roles, such as Beyond Borders (a project dear to her heart, about refugees), and The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro.

But that impressive early career also came with a reputation for wildness and Jolie has what might be called a colourful past. She has been married twice – briefly, to British actor Jonny Lee Miller (after they starred together in Hackers, an early break-out role), and then famously, for three years, to Billy Bob Thornton. If Jolie seemed to have gone a bit off the rails in her youth – cutting herself and dyeing her hair – that marriage made her seem even wilder. At one point these two took to wearing necklaces with vials of each other’s blood, and there were interviews where she talked of her fascination with knives and her bisexuality. Voight and Jolie, who had always had a fractious relationship, but appeared together in Tomb Raider (with him playing Lara Croft’s father), fell out again when Voight publicly questioned her exploits. In short, for a while Jolie was Hollywood’s favourite bad girl.

Jolie recently said, “I am still at heart – and always will be – just a punk kid with tattoos.” But today, at 32, she sounds all grown up, and indeed has four children: Maddox, 6, who she adopted as a baby (while married to Thornton), Pax, 3, and two-year-old Zahara, who are also adopted, and 16-month-old Shiloh, her biological daughter with Pitt. So has being a mother changed her? “Yes, but not so much that I’m not the person I was before... certainly parenthood grounds us both in the most wonderful way.” They take it in turns to work. When we meet, Jolie has taken a few days off from filming to travel to Cannes to promote A Mighty Heart, which is based on the book by Mariane Pearl, telling the story of the kidnap and murder of her husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, by Islamic terrorists in 2002. Pitt, who serves as a producer on the film but doesn’t appear in it, is taking a back seat – it’s his turn to look after the children.

While it would be ludicrous to suggest theirs is a lifestyle that compares with what the vast majority would consider normal, Jolie’s priority is clearly motherhood, and she strives to retain a bedrock of values. “You know, I always wanted to adopt kids. My mother used to say that I talked about it when I was a little girl. And I’ve always wanted a big family. And Brad’s the same. We are enjoying the children together. So, as much as it’s absolute chaos and sometimes we look at each other and think, ‘My God! What have we done?’, there are many more moments when I couldn’t imagine any one of them not being here. They are such big personalities, and it’s so exciting to watch them grow up. Brad and I would like more kids, but we’re aware that right now we can give special time to each one of them every day, and we want to make sure we continue to do that.

“I haven’t worked for nine months, so I’ve been balancing kids and doing everything, and now I’m ready to work,” Jolie explains. “When I work, Brad stays at home with the kids and vice versa. When we were in India, it was his job to entertain them and he loves that. So it’s all about scheduling. Fortunately, they love travelling, so we go everywhere as a family. I kind of feel that our home is wherever we are.” The children are still too young to take in all the fuss and the fact that Mum and Dad happen to be two of the biggest sex symbols on the planet. “Yeah, that’ll make them laugh. To them we’re two of the dorkiest people on the planet…”

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, A Mighty Heart was Jolie’s most challenging role yet, a far more serious piece than some of the films she is better known for – Lara Croft, or the frothy action thriller Mr and Mrs Smith, in which she co-starred with Pitt and where they first got together. “Do I think about destiny? A bit. I don’t live my life by it. But yes, we’ve talked about how we first met and that our lives would certainly have been different if we hadn’t have been cast together on that one.”

She first met Mariane Pearl a few years ago, when they arranged a “play-date” for their kids. At the time of Daniel Pearl’s abduction, Mariane was six months pregnant and now has a much adored son, five-year-old Adam, born after her husband was murdered. “I knew Mariane a bit because we tried out play-dates,” explains Jolie. “She had a kid, I had a kid, we got in touch and it was like, ‘Let’s get the kids together so they can hang out…’ Separately, Brad had bought the rights to the book, and then they got together and started to talk. It was like, ‘OK, we’re going to make the movie, what do you think?’ And when it came to casting she mentioned me, which was fantastic.”

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