Angelina Jolie files for divorce from Brad Pitt

Angelina Jolie Pitt has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, bringing an end to one of the world's most star-studded, tabloid-generating romances.

Actress Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from her husband Brad Pitt. Picture: AFP/Getty Images

An lawyer for Jolie Pitt, Robert Offer, said on Tuesday that she has filed for the dissolution of the marriage. Offer said the decision to divorce was made “for the health of the family.”

The couple has six children together: Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, and twins Knox and Vivienne.

Though together for 12 years, Pitt and Jolie Pitt only wed in August 2014. They married privately in the French hamlet of Correns in Provence with their children serving as ring bearers and throwing flower petals. They announced the ceremony days later.

This is the second marriage for Pitt, who previously wed Jennifer Aniston. It’s the third for Jolie Pitt, who was previously married to Billy Bob Thornton and Jonny Lee Miller.

Though their initial romance - which started after the pair starred together in 2005’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” - sparked an avalanche of interest, Jolie Pitt and Pitt settled into their own unique kind of domesticity.

The pair adopted children from Cambodia, Vietnam and Ethiopia. And they sought to direct the glare of their celebrity toward other causes. Jolie Pitt, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, became an outspoken voice for refugees and various causes in Africa, as well as for breast cancer treatment after undergoing a double mastectomy.

Jolie Pitt also launched herself as a film director. Last year, the couple starred together in her “By the Sea,” playing a glamorous couple vacationing together in France while their marriage was on the rocks.

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