Angelina Jolie Looks So Different With Short Ringlet Curls

Angelina Jolie has undergone a stunning transformation from Hollywood newbie to award-winning A-lister over the more than 40 years she's been an actor. Throughout her career, she has not only proven she's a versatile actor capable of portraying a wide range of characters but also shown she can rock practically any look, makeup, and hairstyle. Of course, not everyone's perfect — yes, not even Angelina Jolie. She's brought some inappropriate outfits to the red carpet through the years and committed her worst makeup mistake of all time when she showed up at a 2014 movie premiere with a powdery face. The Oscar winner also had us cringing over her unblended hair extensions at the Rome premiere of "Eternals" in 2021. Despite some fashion and beauty misses, Jolie has never been afraid to experiment with different looks, especially when it's for a role.

One of Jolie's most drastic transformations came in 2006 when she filmed the movie "A Mighty Heart," which is based on the 2002 abduction and killing by terrorists of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter. For the film, Jolie traded her signature sleek long hair for short ringlet curls to portray Daniel's wife Mariane Pearl, who searched for him after he went missing and later detailed her harrowing experience in a 2003 memoir that inspired the movie. In throwback set photos shared on Instagram, Jolie looked almost unrecognizable with the hairstyle, which was much shorter and curlier than her iconic long, tousled waves in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" just a year prior. Unlike some of her other hair transformations, however, her Mariane hairstyle was just a wig and was nowhere to be found by the time she walked the red carpet at "A Mighty Heart's" 2007 premiere.

"A Mighty Heart" wasn't Angelina Jolie's first time playing a real person and getting a drastically different hairstyle for a role. In the late '90s, she went through a buzzcut era after she shaved off all her hair to portray Gia Carangi, an '80s supermodel who died at age 26 after being diagnosed with AIDS, in HBO's "Gia." Jolie gushed about the look in a 2017 People magazine video, in which she revealed that it was her "shortest haircut" ever. "I was sick in the film, so I had to look like I had no — [like I was] losing hair. So, I shaved it off with a razor, and I kind of loved it. It was kind of freeing to feel like hair doesn't matter, and get rid of it," the actress recalled.

Jolie's had a few other iconic short hair looks, most notable of which was her pixie cut in the 1995 film "Hackers." However, her short hair phase was as brief as it was stunning, and she seemed to have sported only long hair since the mid-2000s. But in 2024, the actor-director proved she wasn't totally done experimenting with her looks when she appeared on the cover of CR Fashion Book with a bold hairstyle. 

In photos shared by the magazine, she rocked voluminous golden curls while posing in various gold outfits. Jolie's look received applause from many Instagram users, one of whom commented: "She's curly, she's blonde, she's the legend and the icon." Jolie apparently loved the hairstyle as well, as she sported similarly big curls when she attended the premiere of her film, "Maria," at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles a month after the magazine cover's release.