By MARK HARRIS

At 33, Agelina Jolie occupies a rare place within Hollywood’s uppermost tier of female stars.
Wherever she goes, she cannot escape her several identities. The serious actress who won an Oscar for 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted” and much acclaim for playing Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, in last year’s “Mighty Heart” is also the dynamo who can carry action movies, like this summer’s “Wanted.”
There’s also the humanitarian activist who is a member of the United Nations Council on Foreign Relations. And there’s her role as a mother of six and as half of Brangelina, as the ever watchful celebrity magazines call Ms. Jolie and her partner, Brad Pitt.
Ms. Jolie admits that the wealth of available information about her could create a problem for her career. Her ever-growing fame could endanger her ability to do the very job that made her famous in the first place - to make audiences believe she’s somebody else.
“Can I do that-” she asked. “I certainly hope so. I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‘Changeling’ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.”
In “Changeling,” directed by Clint Eastwood, Ms. Jolie plays Christine Collins, a switchboard supervisor and single mother in 1928 Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son is kidnapped. Five months after the child’s disappearance, the Los Angeles Police Department hands her a boy it insists is her son, and officials attempt to destroy her life when she says they’re wrong.
“Changeling” arrived at an especially painful moment for Ms. Jolie. In January 2007 her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of ovarian cancer at 56. “My mom, she was a very, very soft woman,” she said. “It was hard for her to yell, or even curse. But when it came to fighting for her kids, she found a strength she didn’t always know she had. And there’s a part of Christine that I connected to her.”
Grief hit Ms. Jolie hard - and led, oddly, not to “Changeling” but to “Wanted,” a blood-splashed comic-book adaptation in which she played a ruthless gunslinger .
“ For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a ‘Tomb Raider,’ has helped me get out of myself and be physical again,” she said. “It’s like therapy.”
Except for a brief hello years ago , Ms. Jolie said she had never met Mr. Eastwood until she arrived on the “Changeling” set. But she knew of his reputation for finishing even complicated scenes in just a couple of takes.
“I can sometimes roll without even saying a word,” Mr. Eastwood said of his filming process. “I’ll just motion to the cameraman, and he turns it on, and there we go. But she understood what things are like, and she was ready.”
Ms. Jolie described it in other terms. “It made me terribly nervous,” she said. “ There are big, emotional, heavy things in that movie where it was, maximum, two takes. So I woke up in the morning not feeling relaxed. I would make sure I understood where my character was coming from, I was prepared emotionally .”
By the end, Ms Jolie - who learned she was pregnant just before she was to shoot her harrowing scenes set in a mental institution - said she felt “this is how I should always work: I should always be this professional and prepared.”
While Ms. Jolie discussed the film with enthusiasm, it was evident that her mind isn’t mainly on movies now. She has taken all of 2008 off from filmmaking and has only one movie lined up - the spy thriller “Edwin A. Salt,” which will begin production in February.
In addition she will reprise her vocal performance as Tigress in the sequel to this summer’s “Kung Fu Panda.”
After that, she said, she’ll stay home for another full year, and she expects acting to play a diminishing role in her life as time goes by. Deciding to take a job is “really hard,” she said. “Who’s in school at that time? How can I be sure I don’t do too many long hours? Can the three youngest be on the set every day?”
“As long as I can still be with my family, it’s fun,” she added. But I only want to do that, and I’m not looking for anything else.”
About that family, here’s some news: They’re not stopping at six. “Oh, no,” she said happily. “We already started talking about it in the hospital [after she gave birth]. I mean, I know we seem crazy, just bringing ‘em in, one after the other, but we do plan. We make sure one is absorbed completely into the family before we add another. There are moments when we look at everyone around the dinner table and it’s just crazy, but our family is the greatest thing we’ve done in our lives. It can only get better.”