On the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, the name stood out from those of charity workers, teachers and civil servants: Angelina Jolie – Honorary Dame Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, for her campaigning work “for services to UK foreign policy and the campaign to end war zone sexual violence”. This means that the Hollywood A-lister has become one of a tiny group of US citizens to be honoured by the British establishment (though they can’t use their titles).

　　It was an extraordinary accolade – doubly so when you consider that the demure Jolie, who last week hosted a London summit dedicated to ending war rape in her capacity as special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is the same Jolie who, not long ago, was making headlines for her tattoos, hard-drug use and intimately kissing her brother in public.

　　Then she was a twice-divorced, self-confessed bisexual and self-harmer. But in just 14 years, Jolie, 39, has dramatically reinvented herself, from out-of-control starlet and apparent homewrecker (actor Brad Pitt left his wife Jennifer Aniston after meeting Jolie on the set of their film Mr &Mrs Smith) to devoted mother and humanitarian powerhouse, travelling to war zones such as Congo with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary.

　　Her youthful recklessness has transmuted into selfless bravery. Her unauthorised biographer, Andrew Morton, whose most famous subject was Diana, Princess of Wales, became intrigued after learning that she’d been working in Peshawar, Pakistan – “hardly a place for charity workers, let alone bona fide Hollywood movie stars,” he says. “We now see her as a humanitarian and a substantial, solid and serious-minded citizen of the world, not the woman who broke up Jen and Brad.”

　　Then, last year she underwent a preventative double mastectomy after testing positive for a gene linked to breast and ovarian cancers, which killed her mother at the age of 56. This gave Angelina a powerful voice in women’s health.

　　Indeed, so drastic has been her rehabilitation that Jolie’s status is now among the tiny section of Hollywood stars deemed untouchable. According to US pollster Q Scores, which determines celebrities’ likeability factor, Jolie’s score is 23 – meaning 23 per cent of US adults consider her “one of [their] favourite personalities”, while 85 per cent of adults know who she is. This compared with a 15 per cent likeability score and 46 per cent awareness for the average actress. Many of her films have performed poorly at the box office (though her latest,Maleficent, has earned $140 million in just three weeks), yet Jolie is considered one of the few female stars who can “carry” a film, and is estimated to be Hollywood’s highest-paid actress, earning $33 million last year.

　　“She’s hardly Meryl Streep, but the actual quality of her work is irrelevant. She’s Hollywood royalty, a megabrand,” says one film insider. Indeed, a recent poll named her, along with Pitt, as the celebrities most sought-after for endorsements. “Jolie has formed a strong emotional bond with American consumers, which is on the rise,” confirms Henry Schafer, executive vice-president of Q Scores.

　　Perhaps her appeal comes from her chameleon-like qualities. She has a sex-bomb persona (she is regularly named the world’s most beautiful woman by magazines such as Vogue) but is simultaneously a “madonna”, the mother of six children, three of whom are adopted.

　　“What’s remarkable about Jolie is she’s the best at everything she touches,” says Christina Hopkinson, author of The A-List Family. “When she was in her bad-girl phase, she was the baddest imaginable. Now she’s a mother, she’s the ultimate earth-mother of three boys and three girls – even her twins were the perfect boy-girl combination.

　　“She projects a cool, independent persona but she also appears to have a blissful home life with the ultimate movie star, Brad Pitt. She’s skinny but with big breasts – and you can’t even hate her for those breasts, because she’s had a mastectomy.”

　　Born in Los Angeles, Jolie is the daughter of actors Jon “Midnight Cowboy” Voight and the late Marcheline Bertrand, but her parents split when she was a baby as a result of Voight’s infidelities. Jolie and Voight’s relationship has been stormy ever since, with the pair not speaking for years at a time.

　　In contrast, she forged a possibly-too-close bond with her mother, who treated her like a friend, allowing Jolie to have a live-in lover from the age of 14.

　　Living in modest circumstances compared with her peers at Beverly Hills High School, Jolie was bullied. She became anorexic and began to self-harm, cutting herself with her collection of knives. Wearing only black clothes, she aspired to become a funeral director, taking a course in embalming. She decorated her body with 14 tattoos, including the Latin proverb quod me nutrit me destruit (“what nourishes me destroys me”). By the age of 20, she had tried “just about every drug possible”, including heroin.