Jolie was born in Los Angeles, California, and is the daughter of divorced actors Jon Voight and American born Marcheline Bertrand. She is the niece of Chip Taylor and the goddaughter of Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell. In an article in Vogue (2004) she stated that her mother is from Chicago. At the Premiere Magazine "Women in Hollywood" Awards she said her mom was born in a bowling alley. She has stated that because of her name people often assume that her mother is French. Jolie's grandparents were French Canadian. Her mother also studied with Lee Strasberg. She is of Czech, French-Canadian, English, and Iroquois descent. As a child she dreamed of becoming a funeral director. She attended the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute from the age of 11, later attending Beverly Hills High School. Though she enrolled at the film school at New York University after finishing Gia, she did not complete her studies.

On March 28, 1996 she married British actor Jonny Lee Miller, with whom she had co-starred in the movie Hackers. Jolie attended her wedding in black leather trousers and a white shirt, which had her husband's name painted in her blood on the back. Jolie and Miller divorced on February 3, 1999. Jolie then married American actor Billy Bob Thornton on May 5, 2000. Due to their frequent public declarations of passion and gestures of love (most famously wearing each others' blood in vials around their necks), their relationship was a favorite topic of the entertainment media. Together they adopted a son from Cambodia, Maddox Chivan Thornton Jolie, who was born on August 5, 2001. Jolie and Thornton divorced on May 27, 2003, and Jolie now has custody of Maddox.