Brad Pitt

Pitt grew up in Springfield, Missouri, in a Southern Baptist household, the son of a trucking-company owner and a school counselor, and enrolled at the University of Missouri to study journalism with an eye toward advertising. Two weeks before he would have graduated, he left for Los Angeles instead, took acting classes with coach Roy London, and spent several years picking up uncredited bit parts and television guest spots before anyone outside a casting office knew his name. The role that changed that was small: a few minutes of screen time in 1991 as a hitchhiking cowboy who seduces Geena Davis's character in Thelma & Louise, enough to make him, almost overnight, a name studios wanted attached to a poster.

The decade after Thelma & Louise built the two sides of Pitt's career at once: the movie star, in Legends of the Fall (1994), Seven (1995) and Ocean's Eleven (2001), and the actor willing to disappear into stranger work, in 12 Monkeys (1995) and Fight Club (1999). In 2001 he co-founded the production company Plan B Entertainment, which went on to produce 12 Years a Slave, Moneyball and The Big Short and won the Best Picture Oscar for 12 Years a Slave in 2014 with Pitt credited as a producer. He won his own Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor, in 2020 for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. By 2025 his films had grossed more than 7.5 billion dollars worldwide, and that year's Formula One drama F1 became Apple's biggest box-office release yet.

Pitt's marriage to Angelina Jolie ended in September 2016 after an incident on a private plane that Jolie's later court filings described as Pitt grabbing and shaking her and striking one of their children — the FBI and Los Angeles County child welfare authorities both investigated and neither filed charges. Pitt has said the episode pushed him into sobriety that same month and has spoken publicly about attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings since. The custody fight that followed ran for years, shifting between joint and primary arrangements, and in 2025 his daughter Shiloh legally dropped the Pitt surname, a change two of his other children had reportedly already made informally. What is documented is the allegation and the investigations that produced no charges — not any court finding on the underlying claim itself.

Pitt has been with jewelry executive Ines de Ramon since 2022 and, by his and her representatives' accounts, has no near-term plans to remarry. At 62 he has said little publicly about slowing down, following F1 with no announced project as of this writing. Whether his standing settles around the producer of 12 Years a Slave and the character actor of Fight Club, or around the abuse allegations and the family estrangement that followed the Jolie divorce, is not a question the record has answered yet — both strands are still active in how he is written about.

Brad Pitt's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Thelma & Louise film
  Breakout supporting role 1991
• Seven film 1995
• Fight Club film 1999
• Plan B Entertainment company
  Co-founded; produced 12 Years a Slave, Moneyball and The Big Short 2001
• 12 Years a Slave film
  Best Picture Oscar, 2014, as producer 2013
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood film
  Best Supporting Actor Oscar, 2020 2019

• December 18, 1963 aged 0 Born in Shawnee, Oklahoma
• 1982 aged ~19 Enrolls at the University of Missouri
• 1991 aged ~28 Breaks out in Thelma & Louise
• July 29, 2000 aged 36 Marries Jennifer Aniston
• 2001 aged ~38 Co-founds Plan B Entertainment
• October 2, 2005 aged 41 Divorces Jennifer Aniston
• August 14, 2014 aged 50 Marries Angelina Jolie
• September 2016 aged 52 A private-plane incident precipitates Jolie's divorce filing and Pitt's sobriety
• 2020 aged ~57 Wins the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor

• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. collaborator
• Leonardo DiCaprio b. 1974
  Oscar-winning actor and environmental activist whose career spans blockbusters and prestige dramas. co-starred with
• Michael Lewis b. 1960
  Author and financial journalist whose Moneyball and The Big Short turned complex topics into bestsellers. adapted
• George W. Bush b. 1946
  43rd president who led the country after the September 11 attacks and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. criticized