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On the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, the name stood out from those of charity workers, teachers and civil servants: Angelina Jolie – Honorary Dame Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, for her campaigning work “for services to UK foreign policy and the campaign to end war zone sexual violence”. This means that the Hollywood A-lister has become one of a tiny group of US citizens to be honoured by the British establishment (though they can’t use their titles). It was an extraordinary accolade – doubly so when you consider that the demure Jolie, who last week hosted a London summit dedicated to ending war rape in her capacity as special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is the same Jolie who, not long ago, was making headlines for her tattoos, hard-drug use and intimately kissing her brother in public. Then she was a twice-divorced, self-confessed bisexual and self-harmer. But in just 14 years, Jolie, 39, has dramatically reinvented herself, from out-of-control starlet and apparent homewrecker (actor Brad Pitt left his wife Jennifer Aniston after meeting Jolie on the set of their film Mr & Mrs Smith) to devoted mother and humanitarian powerhouse, travelling to war zones such as Congo with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary. Her youthful recklessness has transmuted into selfless bravery. Her unauthorised biographer, Andrew Morton, whose most famous subject was Diana, Princess of Wales, became intrigued after learning that she’d been working in Peshawar, Pakistan – “hardly a place for charity workers, let alone bona fide Hollywood movie stars,” he says. “We now see her as a humanitarian and a substantial, solid and serious-minded citizen of the world, not the woman who broke up Jen and Brad.” | 
