Angelina Jolie: most beautiful humanitarian It's refreshing to read about a celebrity whose cause is more than keeping themselves in the limelight. Angelina Jolie -- who just climbed to the top of People's annual list of the beautiful people -- is using her celebrity to help focus the media's attention on the less fortunate.
That's the good that celebrity can do. Yes, Jolie is still in the limelight. But she's using her overexposure to draw attention to the plight of the world's poor children. When Princess Diana learned that the media were going to watch her every move, she decided to use that exposure to draw attention to the global problem of land mines. Now, Angelina Jolie is doing the same thing.
At her level, celebrity drives a Faustian bargain. It makes you wealthy and famous, but it demands the last shred of your privacy. Dozens of paparazzi are stalking them through her confinement, hoping to capture a million-dollar baby picture. They are fodder for the grinding mill of 30-second attention spans, beauty shop analyses and late-night comics.
What Jolie does is take all that and make it work for other people. She travels the world relentlessly, cameras in her wake, focusing attention on poor children. She has adopted children from Cambodia and Ethiopia. She spent the last three Christmases not in Aspen or Cabo or Paris, but in refugee camps in Asia and Africa.