Angelina Jolie interview: Tres Jolie

She is one half of the most famous couple on the planet, an Oscar-winning actress and a mother of six – and now Angelina Jolie is Clint Eastwood's leading lady

ANGELINA JOLIE DOES NOT travel light. When she arrived in New York for the Film Festival premiere of Changeling, the new Clint Eastwood drama in which she stars, she brought along her partner of three years, Brad Pitt, and their sons, Maddox, seven, and Pax, four, daughters Zahara, three, and Shiloh, two, and three-month-old twins Knox and Vivienne.

All eight had flown from Germany, where the family has settled while Pitt is shooting Quentin Tarantino's Second World War adventure, Inglorious Bastards. "We're all a little jet-lagged," Jolie says, not looking jet-lagged in the least as she settles into their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria before moving the clan to New Orleans.

Carrying a lot of baggage is something Jolie seems to greet with serenity – as a mother. As an actress, however, she knows it's a potential problem.

At 33, she occupies a rare place in Hollywood's uppermost tier of female stars. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she cannot escape her several identities. The serious actress, who won an Oscar for 1999's Girl, Interrupted and acclaim for playing Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel, in last year's A Mighty Heart, is also the dominatrix-like action dynamo who can open slam-bang guy movies like this summer's Wanted.

There's also the humanitarian activist – she has served as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and is now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And there's her role as half of Brangelina, an unincorporated business that remains the celebrity magazine industry's best bet for surviving the current economic crisis. Jolie, who is disarmingly easy-going and more delicately beautiful and finely featured than red carpet photographs might suggest, says she usually manages to ignore her alternative plane of existence as a tabloid sensation. She lives "in a bit of a bubble when it comes to people's perceptions of me, which I'm sure is a very good thing", she says, laughing, "because I'm sure it's not always very nice".

If Jolie finds the attention irritating, she's too smart to complain about it. But she admits that the wealth of available information about her could endanger her ability to do the very job that made her famous in the first place – to make audiences believe she's somebody else. To vanish, even.

"Can I do that?" she asks. "I certainly hope so. I wouldn't put myself forward to do a film like Changeling if I thought I couldn't pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me."

In Changeling, Jolie plays Christine Collins, a switchboard supervisor and single mother in 1928 Los Angeles, whose nine-year-old son is kidnapped. (The story has its roots in a series of gruesome killings known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.)

Five months after the child's disappearance, the Los Angeles Police Department hands over a boy it insists is her son, and department officials attempt to destroy her life when she insists that they're wrong. The role, in which Jolie must make convincing the agony of a mother who fears that her only child has been murdered, puts her back in the heart-rending territory of A Mighty Heart.

When she first read the Changeling script, she thought: "This is absolutely great, and I never want to do it," Jolie recalls. "I don't want to put my consciousness on children being kidnapped. But I couldn't forget about her. I found myself telling Brad and friends of mine the story."

Changeling arrived at an especially painful moment for Jolie. In January 2007, her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian cancer, aged 56. "My mom, she was a very, very soft woman," she says. "It was hard for her to yell, or even curse. But when it came to fighting for her kids, she found a strength she didn't always know she had. And there's a part of Christine that I connected to her." She kept pictures of her mother inside the handbags her character uses in the film.

Grief hit Jolie hard – and led, oddly, not to Changeling but Wanted, a blood-splashed, 18 certificate, comic-book adaptation in which she gives what she wryly calls "my Clint Eastwood performance" as a ruthless, almost superhuman gunslinger who utters barely two dozen lines.

"I knew, instinctively, that I needed something before Changeling," she says. "I was depleted. I was in a state of just wanting to pull the covers over my head and cry about my mom. It was just too much. For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a Tomb Raider, has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. It's like therapy."

Jolie, who says she doesn't particularly like to watch her own work, hasn't seen Wanted. The film has grossed more than 300 million worldwide. "I'm glad it worked out," she says, smiling.

She has, however, seen Changeling. "Clint asked me to," she says. "What are you going to do, say no to Clint?" Except for a brief "hello" some years ago, backstage at the US chatshow Larry King Live, Jolie says she had never met Eastwood until she arrived on the Changeling set. But she knew his reputation for running a tight ship and finishing even complicated scenes in just a couple of takes.

Eastwood, talking about his filming process, says, "I can sometimes roll without even saying a word. I'll just motion to the cameraman, and he turns it on, and there we go. But (Jolie] understood what things are like, and she was ready."

"It made me terribly nervous," Jolie says. "The first day it moved so quickly. There are big, emotional, heavy things in that movie where it was – maximum – two takes. So I woke up in the morning not feeling relaxed. I would make sure I understood where my character was coming from, I was prepared emotionally, my lines were crisp. I was more ready than I'd ever been on a film because that's what he demands." By the end, Jolie – who learned she was pregnant just before she was to shoot some of her most harrowing scenes for the movie – says she felt "this is how I should always work: I should always be this professional and this prepared".

Since winning her Oscar almost ten years ago, Jolie has carved out a distinctive identity; unlike most other actresses of her age she is interchangeable with no-one. Growing up, she says, she found her on-screen role models weren't actresses but rather "Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, Brando in Streetcar, Nicholson – I just always liked the men". That may be part of the reason she has become virtually the only current A-list actress to achieve her status while completely bypassing romantic comedies. Nobody is ever likely to call her "America's Sweetheart".

A dark period, when she was cast as the man-eater who broke up Pitt's marriage to Jennifer Aniston during the production of the 2005 action caper Mr and Mrs Smith, is behind her. And while in her twenties she was prone to making provocative statements about blood, tattoos and bisexuality, in her early thirties she has learned how to feed the media beast while making it serve her purposes. Recently, she and Pitt auctioned off pictures of themselves with their newborn twins to People and Hello! magazines, raising an astonishing 14 million for their charity, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

Today, her career strategy seems more akin to, say, George Clooney's than to Cameron Diaz's. She has amassed an impressive record in action-driven hits like the Tomb Raider movies and Gone in 60 Seconds, while making regular (and generally less successful) forays into more serious work, most recently in ensemble pieces such as the 2006 drama, The Good Shepherd, or A Mighty Heart, in which several critics suggested her fine performance was undermined by her celebrity.

Changeling, a big-studio drama that she must carry while submerging the tensile, sexually charged physicality with which she has often defined herself, is another step outside her comfort zone. Jolie discusses the film with enthusiasm, but it is evident her mind isn't mainly on movies now. She has taken 2008 off from film-making and has only one movie project lined up – the spy thriller Edwin A Salt, which will begin production in February and which, in an indication of her box office clout, was reconceived for her after Tom Cruise dropped out.

In addition, she will reprise her vocal performance as Tigress in the sequel to this summer's Kung Fu Panda – the only one of her roughly three dozen movies that any of her children have seen. "It's a big hit in the house," she says. "Jack Black is like De Niro to the kids."

After that, she says, she'll stay at home for another full year, and she expects acting to play a diminishing role in her life as time goes by. For the past several months, since the twins were born, the older children have been home-schooled, "and they've had Mommy and Daddy every day for every meal, and they've been very close to us". It's not a routine she's eager to disrupt. Deciding to take a job is "really hard", she says. "Who's in school at that time? How can I be sure I don't do too many long hours? Can the three youngest be on the set every day?

"As long as I can still be with my family, it's fun," she adds. "But I only want to do that, and I'm not looking for anything else."

About that family, are she and Pitt planning to stop at six? "Oh, no," she says happily. "I mean, I know we seem crazy, just bringing them in one after the other, but we do plan. We make sure one is absorbed completely into the family before we add another. There are moments when we look at everyone around the dinner table, and it's just crazy, but our family is the greatest thing we've done in our lives."

It's hardly surprising that the children are Jolie's focus right now. She worries about the day Maddox, now old enough to use the internet, will "look up my name and see some kind of sexy pictures or read a story about himself that isn't true. There's a lot we're going to have to explain to them about how public their family is."

None the less, she says, she looks forward to the day when she can put Mr and Mrs Smith in the DVD player for the children: "Not a lot of people get to see a movie where their parents fell in love.

"What's going to be funny is when they think Mom and Dad are a little bit cool," she adds. "Because right now, we're not cool Mom and Dad.

"Even video games, you know, it's: 'Mom, you can't play this. You won't know how.' Oh, they all think I can't do anything, that I'm just there to snuggle with. But the other day Madd said, 'Can you do a cartwheel?' And I said, 'Yeah, I can.' And he was like, 'Wow, Mom.' And I thought: 'Oh, yeah. I can do some things. You wait. You'll find out. I'm capable.'"

• Changeling opens on 28 November.