Angelina Jolie: I Never Thought I’d Have Kids, Find Love

Angelina Jolie is happily engaged to Brad Pitt, and after 10 years together, the couple have six children. But the actress didn’t always think a family was in the cards for her.

“I never thought I’d have children, I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person,” Angelina, 38, tells ELLE’s June issue. “Having come from a broken home—you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.”

With a decade of romance between her and Brad, Angelina said she and the 50-year-old actor are now “more interested in each other” than ever.

“You get together and you’re two individuals and you feel inspired by each other, you challenge each other, you complement each other, drive each other beautifully crazy,” she said. “After all these years, we have history, and when you have history with somebody, you’re friends in such a very real, deep way that there’s such a comfort, and an ease, and a deep love that comes from having been through quite a lot together.”

The “Maleficent” star also spoke about her wild twenties and previously tumultuous love life (she has two prior marriages – one to Jonny Lee Miller, one to Billy Bob Thornton).

“[My 20s] were misinterpreted as [me] wanting to be rebellious. And in fact it wasn’t a need to be destructive or rebellious—it’s that need to find a full voice, to push open the walls around you. You want to be free,” she said. “And as you start to feel that you are being corralled into a certain life, you kind of push against it. It may come out very strange, it may be interpreted wrong, but you’re trying to find out who you are.”

The actress was scared she was falling into a life “half-lived.”

“I realized that very young—that a life where you don’t live to your full potential, or you don’t experiment, or you’re afraid, or you hesitate, or there are things you know you should do but you just don’t get around to them, is a life that I’d be miserable living, and the only way to feel that I’m on the right path is just to be true to myself, whatever that may be, and that tends to come with stepping out of something that’s maybe safe or traditional,” she said.

— Erin O’Sullivan