Here's what most people know about Angelina Jolie: When she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar last year for Girl, Interrupted, she sparked an international gossip frenzy by announcing, "I am so in love with my brother right now." She collects knives and likes getting tattoos. She became Billy Bob Thornton's fifth wife a few years after divorcing British actor Jonny Lee Miller, whom she married while wearing a white shirt that had his name dribbled on it in her own blood. She's actor Jon Voight's daughter, but she always wanted to be a mortician when she grew up.

Here's what people should know about Angelina Jolie: She's far less weird and wild and more self-deprecating and thoughtful than the press usually lets on.

She prefers Anaconda-the campy creature feature which starred her dad as a maniacal snake poacher-over his Academy Award-winning classic Midnight Cowboy, primarily because she always kept snakes and lizards as pets when she was little. And the thing she likes most about bringing a computergame goddess to life in this summer's $80 million action extravaganza Tomb Raider is the fact that the little kids who now approach her for autographs usually ask, "Can you sign this as Lara Croft?"

Soon enough, a lot of other folks should start confusing the stunning 25- year-old Jolie with cyberbabe Lara Croft and forget the personal eccentricities which too often have overshadowed the actress's considerable talent. Jolie says she wouldn't have accepted the part in Tomb Riader if fanboys around the world hadn't made her their top pick to fill out Croft's body-hugging tank top on the silver screen. On the other hand, as a veteran of intense dramas whose fast foray into action playing a car thief in Nic Cage vehicle Gone in 60 Seconds - was a relative disappointment, Jolie wasn't exactly gunnig to grab Lara's uzis when director Simon West first approached her with the project.

When I heard they were going to talk top me about it, I didn't think it was a good idea," she says. "[Then] I met Simon and the people working on the film. After hearing how they were going to do it and it was very different than what I had imagined it would be, I had to admit to myself that I really wanted to do it. But it took a while."

West's concept for the movie, Jolie says, was to "bring in all the magical elements" of Lara's relic-hunting adventures. "He really made it a puzzle," she explains. "It's all based on real things, real myths or real different cultures. I thought [West] was a man who would undrestand women and see [Lara as being] sexy but also want her to fight like a man, want to have huge explosions and have her hanging off of a cliff. So it wasn't going to be campy or cute. It was her as a warrior in this magic world."

But actors who play warriors usually have to become warriors of sorts themselves. Tomb Raider was no different - in order to prepare for the role, Jolie was thrust into a strenuous routine of gymnastics, kick- boxing, weight-training, motorcycle riding and bungee jumping; she also had to give up wine and cigarettes in favor of a high protein diet.

"I didn't think I could pull it off," she admits. "I didn't know if I could become somebody like her and just get through it and get really healthy. I wasnted to see the limits I could put on myself physically and mentally. It's bizzare - it's harder to stay in a positive, healthy, clear, brave state of mind all the time. Sometimes it's easier to go into yourself and get dark, which is what I am used to."

Delving into that darkness has been ocassionally problematic for Jolie. On the one hand, the emotional connection she makes with her characters has spawned in inspired, award-winning performances. But when an actor really gets into a playing a junkie lesbian supermodel (she won a Golden Globe for the HBO biopic Gia) or a violently schizophrenic teen (as in Girl, Interrupted), blurring that line between art and reality becomes risky.

The ever-candid Jolie has publicly acknowledged the physical and emotional strain that accompanied some of her more intense roles. However, now that she's happily married to Thornton and enjoying the peak physical condition that she honed during the rigorous Tomb Raider shoot, the relationship between her and the video game superheroine she plays seems rather healthy.

"I had never in my life attempted the things I did in that film," Jolie says. "I'm a stronger person now. There's just something more open about my life. It's a weird character and a strange film to be a part of because it's as if I joined the army for a few months and had an adventure, and half of me is an actress and half of me is Lara Croft. It's like having a spit personality."

Enduring rigorous athletic training wasn't the only tough part of becoming Lara. After all the intrepid British beauty had already starred in five best-selling video games and appeared on more than 200 magazine covers around the world before Jolie ever volunteered to strap on her backpack.

"It was probably one of the hardest things I had ever done as an actress," she says. "Creating her was creating a world and a person and a life. Everything about her needed to be very specific to detail because it needed to match the woman. I am not English and that's very much who she is," Jolie continues. "I wanted to really understand someone being raised a certain way in England, their culture, the accent, and also the class that she's raised in - the manners. She's Lady Lara Croft and I had very little practice in being a lady. There was more to Lara Croft than other people I've played because there are so many different aspects of her: part of her is a lady and cultured and raised in Europe and there's the part of her that's a soldier. In a lot of ways her backstory and her history were a lot more complex than anything I'd done before. A lot of the time a character doesn't need to be that complete of a person."

Then there's the matter of Lara's younger fans, many of whom seemed sceptical about Jolie's qualifications for the part.

"We had all these little kids come and visit the set," she recalls. "They came up to me and they new exactly how long Lara can hold her breath underwater and they want to see me do it. She was very much already created, down to her birthday. People know things about her: where she's been, how she's trained, who she's been with, which schools she went to, which languages she speaks. It's a different thing to approach a character like this when people already have [such a strong] perception of her."

Then there's the matter of Lara's other claim to fame - namely, the bodacious figure that's caused millions of gamers to slavishly drool all over their CD-ROMs and inspired Details magazine to name her one of the Sexiest Women of The Year. Jolie says that while she sees her Lara as a cross between Sophia Loren and the Crocodile Hunter (how's that for a mental picture?), she doesn't quite share the extreme build of her digital predecessor.

"We've altered her a bit," she explains. "She's still got a lot of what makes her Lara Croft. But I'm more athletic; she's more curvy. I hope it will be good enough for what everyone wants. She's now become human. But the positive part of it is, I'm all for curves on a woman and feeling sexy and not hiding from it and kind of enjoying it. [I'm] hoping that everybody will enjoy it as well."

Starring in Tomb Raider also gave Jolie her first opportunity to work with her dad. (Jolie doesn't use her father's last name because Voight and Jolie's mother, former French actress Marcheline Bertrand, gave their daughter - born Angelina Jolie Voight - a versatile middle name in case she didn't want to be saddled with a famous surname.) Although her parents divorced when she was only a year old, Jolie and her father have forged a close relationship in the past few years. So when it came time to cast the key role of Lord Croft, Lara's explorer father, Voight seemed a natural choice.

"We'd never [acted together] before because we couldn't do just anything," she says. "The relationship the characters had in a certain film or what the film was saying would somehow affect us personally. The personal relationship does get in the way because suddenly what you're saying to each other carries a different weight. But it was so perfect for him to play this character just because it's very similar to our relationship. You know, she follows the same career that her father does. My parents were separated but my dad was always around and always trying to teach me things. [Likewise,] she lost her father early on in her life but he had a strong influence on her. So it was extremely sentimental for us because it was very much how we really are. But it was also fun to suddenly look up to your dad and you're both in costumes with accents - playing and being actors and doing what you both love. It was very moving."

But don't think that Angelina Jolie's knife-wielding, hellcat image is just a ruse for the sensitive daddy's girl hiding underneath. Her provokative habits may have been overblown by the media, but there's still a lot of Lara Croft in her.

"I'm having my guns sent [over from the set]," she casually remarks after being asked what souvenirs she's taken from the Tomb Raider shoot. "Theye were just put in their case so I can have Lara's guns. I became really close to them and wore them every day so I want them here [at home]. It's unny," she says. "I thought Tomb Raider was really, really hard from what I was used to. But it's not. The essence of her is very similar to all the other characters I've played - somebody who's kind of alone, focused on justice or setting things righ and is kind of a little insane. And then there's a whole personality that's emerged from me that I didn't know was there. I kept thinking, 'I can't do this, I'm a serious actor.' And then suddenly I was in my little outfit on top of a mountain in Iceland with big guns and some dogs pulling me in a sled. And I thought, 'Yeah, this is exactly who I am!'