Here are some highlights from PARADE’s cover story.

When Rader asks if their children are the reason she and Brad stay together, “she looks at me like I am nuts.” Jolie tells Dotson:
“The children certainly tie us together, but a relationship won’t hold if it’s only about the kids. You also must be really interested in each other and have a really, really wonderful, exciting time together. We do. Brad and I love being together. We enjoy it. We need it, and we always find that special time. We stay connected. We talk about it. It’s very important. If Brad and I are strong and happy, then our kids have happy parents, and that’s the best thing we can give them.” She adds, “Brad knows me completely, exactly as I am, every part of me. He loves me. The kids love me. They know all my flaws and all my oddities. And they accept them. And so I can feel complete.”

On knowing love…
“I feel sad for someone who has never known love. Love elevates. You know, Brad would joke about me having this conversation about love. Love? It’s such a funny word. Brad can find certain phrases of poetry for it. I’m terrible at it. But I know it means wanting the best for the people you love, putting their interests above your own, always. Love does that. Love is what you live for.”

On her rebellious past…
“I used to cut myself or jump out of airplanes, trying to find something new to push up against because sometimes everything else felt too easy. I was searching for something deeper, something more. I tried everything. I always felt caged, closed in, like I was punching at things that weren’t there. I always had too much energy for the room I was in.”

On her early roles in Hollywood…
“I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life.” She points out an inscription on her arm, one of her 13 tattoos. “The wild heart caged. I unlocked my cage years ago. I want my children to have that freedom. I want that for other people, too.”

On the unrelenting media circus, the paparazzi…
“We do everything we can to keep our kids away from it. We travel to places where the kids aren’t aware of that kind of thing. We try to give them a full life where they don’t have to come face to face with that world. With the paparazzi present, we’re careful when we leave the house. Other than that…” She laughs at the absurdity of it all. “We don’t stand in the checkout line at the grocery store looking at the magazines. Our friends don’t tell us about it. And our kids don’t know. I feel if we keep looking out for them, they’ll be fine.”

On balancing work and children with Brad…
“He takes the kids to school; he visits me on set with the kids. I’m home for dinner, or I’m there for breakfast. We’re together all the time. We plan. Brad and I take time off between films to travel, have big experiences, do things together. That’s how we work it out.”

On being a happy homebody…
“There’s never a period when Brad and I are pulled apart. We are not separated for more than three days, ever. We stay really connected. We actually don’t go out much. It’s funny. We’re very homebound. We’re very much Mommy and Daddy in our pajamas.”

On her late mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died in 2007 of ovarian cancer…
“Mother never put herself first, ever. At the end, she said her greatest success was being a mother. I remember Mother singing in church. How pretty she was! I lit candles with her. She said she had missed nothing in life except getting to know her grandchildren. When she passed away, I brought my son to church to light a candle for her.” Jolie’s eyes fill with tears. “Forgive me,” she says. “I loved her so much.”

Check out the full interview in the Sunday, July 11, issue of PARADE, available in your Sunday newspaper.

Source: Parade

Jolie says she and Brad Pitt also are not “against getting married,” but “it’s just like we already are. Children are clearly a commitment, a bigger commitment [than marriage]. It’s for life.”

Despite her dedication to her work, she thinks she won’t do it much longer: “It’s not the most important thing in my life. Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful, it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury. Look, I’m at work today in the middle of Venice. But I don’t think I’ll do it much longer.” Jolie says this reassessment is mostly due to her family: “Because I have a happy home….I got back from work last night, and everybody was playing music and dancing and I suddenly found myself dancing around with a bunch of little fun crazy people.”

Jolie talks extensively about her children, explaining that “Mad’s a real intellectual, which I can take no credit for genetically. He’s great at school, great at history. He feels like he could be a writer or travel the world and learn about places and things. Zahara’s got an extraordinary voice and is just so elegant and well spoken. Shiloh’s hysterically funny, one of the goofiest, most playful people you’ll ever meet. Knox and Viv are classic boy and girl. She’s really female. And he’s really a little dude.”

Jolie says that when she was growing up she was most like her daughter Shiloh: “Goofy and verbal, the early signs of a performer…. I used to get dressed up in costumes and jump around. But at some point, I got closed off, darker. I don’t remember anything happening. I think you just get hit with the realities of certain things in life, think too much, start to realize the world isn’t as you wished it would be, so you deepen. Then, as I had kids and got older—being goofy, lighter—it all came back.”

And what does Angelina think of Brad’s strange, wispy beard? “I love Brad in every state.”

Elsewhere in the article she talks about a range of topics.

On what Brad has been up to in Venice:
“He sculpts and designs. He makes furniture, sculpts things related to houses. Traditional male.”

On Brad with the kids:
“I keep telling Brad he owes me. He’s had a few months off in one of the most beautiful cities in the world with the children. And he’s such an artist and goes to the stone yards and the art exhibits, and loves being in such a cultural place.”

On a potential Mr. & Mrs. Smith sequel:
“People have tried. And it’s strange: do we have kids in the movie? We’ve thought about that, but it becomes personal now that we actually have kids. And if we work on it, we pull from our own life, which is funny to us, but you feel strange sharing too much. We did ask somebody to look into Mr. & Mrs. to see if they could crack a sequel, but there wasn’t anything original. It was just, Well, they’re going to get married, or they’ve got kids, or they get separated. Never great.”

On co-starring again with Brad:
“I’d love to. We’ve talked about it. We’d have to figure out who’s going to watch the kids, but it’s really about finding the right thing, because we’ve looked. When you’re a couple, there are certain things people don’t want to see you do. It becomes too indulgent, too personal. I don’t think people want to see people who are really together intimate on-screen. Maybe we have to play bad guys that try to kill each other, so it’s just fun and aggressive, not dealing with some man-woman deal.”

The August issue of Vanity Fair will be available on newsstands in New York and L.A. on Wednesday, June 30, and nationally and on the iPad on Tuesday, July 6.

Source: Vanity Fair

Gallery Links:
- Entertainment Weekly – April 23 2010

The humanitarian star has been filming the spy drama “Salt” on location in New York City and Washington, D.C., but she hasn’t forgotten about her causes. Jolie wrote an article for Time magazine earlier this month expressing outrage over the conflict in Darfur.

“Darfur has almost disappeared from the news, and experts now call it a ‘low-intensity’ conflict. But the intensity of the crisis has not lessened for those who are struggling to survive,” she wrote at the time, imploring the United Nations Security Council to move forward on the issue.

The actress was named a UN Goodwill Ambassador in 2001, working under the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees.

Source: Yahoo