She walks into the room wearing a simple taupe dress clinched with a brown belt. On her right forefinger is a ring with an enormous square green stone and on her left shoulder is an elaborate tattoo, lines of numbers that give the longitude and latitude of the birthplaces of her six children and her partner, Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie looks both elegant and tough, just like the characters in her best known films: the sexy secret agents in The Tourist and Salt, the sly assassin in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the heroine of the Lara Croft films.
She's a tigress in heels, so it's not much of a surprise when she says that Tigress -the martial arts expert in the animated Kung Fu Panda films -is "one of the best characters I've ever played."
"I've always been drawn to strong characters and I admire strong women, emotionally and physically, who are fighting for something. I have a sense of justice and injustice. It's always been more than just trying to be tough."
Tigress gets to show her softer side in Kung Fu Panda 2, the sequel that is being promoted in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival.
Jolie was the main attraction, although she shared the stage with two other celebrity voices: Dustin Hoffman, who returns as Shifu, the wise old master and Jack Black, who stars as Po, the panda with a big appetite for junk food and an even bigger one for vanquishing enemies.
But Jolie drew the paparazzi and most of the questions, partly because of accumulated star power of Brangelina -Pitt is in Cannes as well, to promote the festival entry Tree of Life -but also because Kung Fu Panda 2 seems at least partly tailored to her life story.
"We're really growing up with Po and learning about different aspects of human nature," she said. "In the first one, it was that you can be anything you want ... in this one it was very much about family, and no matter what you've gone through in your youth, you can be what you choose to be in life."
In Kung Fu Panda 2, Po the panda discovers that the goose who raised him isn't his real father.
Jolie and Pitt have six children, three of them adopted. Jolie said she took them to see the movie as a kind of informal test audience. Unsurprisingly, they loved it.
"I wondered whether they'd ask me questions about it, but [they didn't] because 'adoption' and 'orphanage' and 'birth mother,' in our home, these are happy words. They're very used to these discussions and they were just that much more proud that they were a little more like Po."