Traditionally on a wedding day there are a number of good luck signs that will indicate a long and healthy marriage; for example if the bride sees a cat sneeze on the morning of the ceremony, or if on the journey to the church she spots either a lawyer, doctor or blind man. And having become man and wife, if the happy couple stumble across a chimney sweep on their way to the reception it's deemed a perticularly fortuitous meeting.

Unfortunately, in the book of "lucky wedding etiquette" it's not seen as such a good omen for the bride to turn up wearing black rubber trousers and a white shirt with her intended's name scrawled across it in her own blood, which was the scene which would have greeted well-wishers at Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie's firt marriage to Trainspotting actor Jonny Lee Miller. The couple separated after a year.

It's incidents like this which have given Angelina Jolie, star of this month's car chase movie Gone in 60 Seconds, a reputation as being "a bit wild" compared to the predictable production line of smiling sweetly, but saying very little, Hollywood actresses. In the past it's been Angelina's "interesting" personal life that has stolen as many headlines as her acting skills. The daughter of Midnight Cowboy actor Jon Voight collects knives and once famously said after she was spotted with scars on her arm and belly, "You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." She also has lots of tattoos including the provocative words, "What nourishes me also destroys me" just above her bikini line.

"I think that can be a bit annoying for anyone who gets my pants off," says Angelina. "I think they get a little confused. It's in Latin so I guess it's only going to affect the intelligent ones."

And on May 5 of this year she set tongues wagging again when for the cut price of $189 she married fellow actor Billy Bob Thornton at a ceremony at the Little Church of the West Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, proving to the world that it was the real thing by having "Billy Bob" tattooed on her arm, he got "Angie" in the same place. "I'm madly in love with this man," she says, "and will be till the day I die."

However it's her individuality and lack of conformity &endash; she wanted to be a funeral director when she was growing up &endash; that have made her the most intriguing, exciting and down right sexiest actresses of her generation. Over the past seven years Angelina has gone from modeling and bit parts in pop videos &endash; Meat Loaf, The Lemonheads &endash; to an Oscar-winning actress with outstanding performances in Gia, The Bone Collector, and Girl, Interrupted for which she won the best supporting actress at March's start-studded ceremony. To get some idea of how hot she is right now, Angelina has beaten off competition from the likes of Elizabeth Hurley and Denise Richards to land the role of cyber babe Lara Croft in a live action version of Tomb Raider, currently being filmed here in the UK.

"I'm just a big softie," she says. "People see the tattoos as dark and romantic. I do feel all that stuff has been like some sly move on my part so that people will focus on the tattoos and the knives and won't really know anything about me."