5 posts tagged “angelina jolie”

Brad Pitt donated $100,000 to fight California's Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that would take away same-sex couples' right to marry.

Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn't harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8," the actor said in a statement.

Pitt's donation is the largest thus far to the anti-Prop 8 campaign by an A-list celebrity, the L.A Times reported.

It is our hope that others in the entertainment industry will step up and match Brad Pitt’s heroic commitment to equality and defeating Prop. 8," Political strategist Chad Griffin said in a statement.

Pitt has said he won't wed Angelina Jolie until gay marriage is made legal.

Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able," the actor told Esquire.

This week, Pitt and Jolie ranked sixth on Parade magazine's list of the most generous celebrities. They gave $8.4 million in 2007.

http://www.usmagazine.com

According to MarieClaire UK, an eerily life-like doll which is the spitting image of actress Angelina Jolie, sold on eBay for a whopping £2000.

Whoever grabbed a celebrity doll for such a huge price is either a really BIG fan, or someone’s who’s overly obsessed with Angelina (Let’s hope not!).

Anyway, the manufacturer of the doll is Noel Cruz from the Philippines. He started painting portraits at the age of 16 and he moved on to celebrity doll-making when he was looking for a figurine to add to his wife’s collection.

Based from the pics, the doll is exquisitely detailed and looked so much like Angelina herself – from the pillow lips to the shape of the nose, to that little mole just above her right eyebrow.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's Jolie-Pitt Foundation has made a $2 million donation to the Global Health Committee to establish a center to aid children affected by tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia.

The center will be modeled after the Cambodian Health Committee's Maddox Chivan Children's Center in Cambodia, where children receive medical, education and social services.

"Our goal is to transfer the success we have had in Cambodia to Ethiopia where people are needlessly dying of tuberculosis, a curable disease, and HIV/AIDS, a treatable disease," Jolie said in a statement.

As in Cambodia, where the couple named the center after their eldest child, the Ethiopian branch will be named for Zahara, 3, who was adopted from Ethiopia.

"It is our hope when Zahara is older she will take responsibility of the clinic and continue its mission," Pitt said in a statement.

The clinic will also focus on tuberculosis care. The disease causes approximately 2 million deaths yearly, and is the largest cause of death worldwide for children and adults with AIDS.

"The fact that poor people continue to die in our world today of TB, a curable disease, because of lack of access to drugs and care is unacceptable," Pitt said.

The Jolie-Pitt foundation was established in Sept. 2006, when the couple donated $1 million to the Global Action for Children organization and $1 million to Doctors Without Borders.

http://www.people.com 

Angelina Jolie could command up to $10 million for the first exclusive pictures of her twins.

Celebrity weekly editors told Page Six that the business of buying baby pictures is out of control. Christina Aguilera reportedly got $1.5 million from People magazine, while Jennifer Lopez took home a staggering $6 million.

One editor said,

    “It’s at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos.”

Well Brad did say, “We’ll crap out between 7 and 9 kids.” The difference with Jolie is, she will likely donate every penny to charity — she donated the money earned from Shiloh’s first pictures to charity.

In 2004, Natalie Portman, then a 22-year-old fresh from college, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congress on behalf of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or Finca, a microfinance organization for which she served as “ambassador.” She found herself wondering what she was doing there, but her colleagues assured her: “We got the meetings because of you.” For lawmakers, Natalie Portman was not simply a young woman — she was the beautiful Padmé from “Star Wars.” “And I was like, ‘That seems totally nuts to me,’ ” Portman told me recently. It’s the way it works, I guess. I’m not particularly proud that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can.”

Well, who is? But it is the way it works. Stars — movie stars, rock stars, sports stars — exercise a ludicrous influence over the public consciousness. Many are happy to exploit that power; others are wrecked by it. In recent years, stars have learned that their intense presentness in people’s daily lives and their access to the uppermost realms of politics, business and the media offer them a peculiar kind of moral position, should they care to use it. And many of those with the most leverage — Bono and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and George Clooney and, yes, Natalie Portman — have increasingly chosen to mount that pedestal. Hollywood celebrities have become central players on deeply political issues like development aid, refugees and government-sponsored violence in Darfur.

Activists on these and other issues talk about the political power of stars with a mixture of bewilderment and delight. But a weapon that powerful is bound to do collateral damage. Some stars, like George Clooney, regard the authority thrust upon them with wariness; others, like Sean Penn or Mia Farrow, an activist on Darfur, seize the bully pulpit with both hands. “There is a tendency,” says Donald Steinberg, deputy president of the International Crisis Group, which seeks to prevent conflict around the world, “to treat these issues as if it’s all good and evil.” Sometimes you need the rallying cry, but sometimes you need to accept a complex truth.

Celebrities, and especially Hollywood celebrities, have always engaged in public philanthropy. In “An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler describes charity dinners of the 1930s where movie-industry moguls would gather at the Hillcrest Country Club and outbid one another with gifts to the United Jewish Welfare Fund and other Jewish causes. In later years, movie stars and politicians treated Marvin Davis’s Carousel Ball, to benefit diabetes research, as a command performance. But the “grip ’n’ grin celebrity stuff,” as the publicist Howard Bragman calls it, has largely passed into history. Nowadays, says Bragman (whose coming book is to be titled “Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?”), “you’ve got to have something for People magazine to shoot you at. You can’t just get $20 million a picture; you’ve got to serve turkey to the poor too.” The old Hollywood philanthropy was passive and dutiful. In those days stars were shaped by the studio system before being delivered to the public. Now, in the era of People and the E! channel and the global swarm of paparazzi, stars shape themselves, and their brands, through their own public acts. And their audience is not just fans but everyone; a star’s life is a kind of public movie. You have to do something with all that attention. As Portman says, “If they’re going to follow me around and take pictures, I’d rather talk about Finca than what dress I’m wearing or who I’m dating or whatever nonsense people care about.”

Most celebrities no longer have charities; they have causes. Eve Ensler has enlisted Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Jessica Alba and others to perform her play “The Vagina Monologues” to raise money to combat sexual abuse against women. Next month, Ensler’s organization, V-Day, will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a weekend of “Superlove” in the New Orleans Superdome, where Ensler’s team of stars will celebrate the resilience of “Katrina warriors” — women in the region who have suffered physical or emotional abuse. Ricki Lake campaigns for natural childbirth; she understands, she says, that “doing something pro-mom and pro-baby and pro-midwife” is her “life’s work.” Paris Hilton was supposedly planning to go to Rwanda soon after she finished her jail stint, and Playing for Good — an organization that staged a three-day “international philanthropic summit” on the resort island of Mallorca, with “the acclaimed actress and philanthropist Eva Longoria” as the host — had hoped to use Hilton’s redemptive escapade as an episode in a reality show to be titled “The Philanthropist.” The show appears to be in turnaround.

An entire industry has sprung up around the recruitment of celebrities to good works. Even an old-line philanthropy like the Red Cross employs a “director of celebrity outreach.” Oxfam has a celebrity wrangler in Los Angeles, Lyndsay Cruz, on the lookout for stars who can raise the charity’s profile with younger people. In addition to established figures like Colin Firth and Helen Mirren, Oxfam is affiliated with Scarlett Johansson, who has visited South Asia (where the organization promotes girls’ education) and is scheduled to go to Mali. Cruz notes that while “trendy young people” are attracted to the star of “Match Point” and “Lost in Translation,” Johansson had “great credibility with an older audience because she’s such a great actress.”

The stars themselves have their own retainers to fend off the celebrity recruiters and to screen and sift charitable opportunities; publicists say their major clients get dozens of requests every week. The more deeply committed figures, like Angelina Jolie, retain firms like the Global Philanthropy Group, which, according to a representative, offers “comprehensive philanthropic management.” This includes establishing and staffing foundations, bringing in subject-area experts or even helping the novice philanthropist figure out what he or she actually wants to do. A similar organization, the Giving Back Fund, works with athletes like the quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and the basketball players Jalen Rose and Shane Battier.

Both the stars and the causes, in turn, depend on corporate sponsorship. It is the sponsors who pay for the galas at which the stars raise money for their causes; sponsors normally pay for the stars’ first-class air tickets and hotel suites. Corporations need causes as much as stars do. Like the stars, they understand that they must shape and protect their brand identities; and they understand that those identities will be judged by the broad public, through public acts. As Howard Bragman puts it, “Celebrities, sponsors and a cause: it’s the golden troika of branding.”

The costs are small compared to the good will. Thus Alicia Keys’s Keep a Child Alive, which provides antiretrovirals to victims of AIDS in Africa, has 78 “corporate partners,” including CBS, Continental Airlines, Condé Nast and Chanel, to pick a few from the C’s. And just as stars have philanthropic managers to help them with causes, corporations with a cause can turn to celebrity recruiters to find just the right star. Thus Rita Tateel, who describes her occupation as recruiting and coordinating celebrities for “cause-related marketing and public relations,” recently hooked up Purina, which wanted to support “small animal-rescue organizations,” with Emily Procter, a star of “CSI Miami,” who, Tateel says, “lives and breathes animal rescue.”