Angelina Jolie’s kids are off playing nearby. “They’re with their dad, actually. Around here somewhere,” she says with a wave of her hand. “And I’m going to hook up with them in a couple of hours. When I’ve done this.” This sounds like a perfectly normal domestic agenda, until you remind yourself that we are sitting in a cabana in the grounds of one of the fanciest hotels on the French Riviera, and that the play-day father in question happens to be Brad Pitt.

“Oh, Brad’s a great father, a very hands-on father,” she smiles. “We’re very hands-on parents, believe me.” Together they form Brangelina, a celebrity soap opera that straddles the globe from Pakistan and India, where they were based as she made her latest film, A Mighty Heart, to Pittsburgh and Peterborough. Everybody knows all about them, don’t they? This is celebrity watching gone nuts. “I don’t see those magazines and I don’t watch those TV programmes,” says Jolie. “I really don’t know about that stuff, and I don’t want to know. Mostly, I’m sure, it’s nonsense.”

The woman before us today, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana white wraparound dress, is undeniably beautiful. Her brown hair is swept back from that remarkable face and those extraordinary lips are free from lipstick and as full as ever. She does, though, look thinner than some two years ago. She says that life is “great”, although she is still grieving from the loss of her mother, French actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died in January this year, aged just 56, after a long battle with ovarian cancer.

“I am my mother’s daughter,” she says. “Very much so. My love of children, my values, caring about what goes on in the world, all of that comes from her. She was the most wonderful woman and a fantastic role model for me. I miss her terribly every day. I try to raise my children the way that my mother raised me. I didn’t really have a father around.” Her father is actor Jon Voight, who married Bertrand when she was 21 and a rising star. They had two children — Angelina has an older brother, James Haven — but were divorced when their daughter was just three. As a teenager, Jolie took up modelling and appeared in pop videos, but quickly broke into the movie business. Indeed she did some of her best work early on in her career, playing a supermodel who dies of Aids in Gia (which won her a Golden Globe), and a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted (which in 2000 won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Jolie has always been happy to combine more commercial films — Foxfire, The Bone Collector, the Tomb Raider movies — with more serious roles, such as Beyond Borders (a project dear to her heart, about refugees), and The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro.

But that impressive early career also came with a reputation for wildness and Jolie has what might be called a colourful past. She has been married twice — briefly, to British actor Jonny Lee Miller, and then famously, for three years, to Billy Bob Thornton. If Jolie seemed to have gone a bit off the rails in her youth — cutting herself and dyeing her hair — that marriage made her seem even wilder. There were interviews where she talked of her fascination with knives and her bisexuality.

Jolie recently said, “I am still at heart — and always will be — just a punk kid with tattoos.” But today, at 32, she sounds all grown up, and indeed has four children: Maddox, 6, who she adopted as a baby (while married to Thornton), Pax, 3, and two-year-old Zahara, who are also adopted, and 16-month-old Shiloh, her biological daughter with Pitt.

So has being a mother changed her? “Yes, but not so much that I’m not the person I was before... certainly parenthood grounds us both in the most wonderful way.” They take it in turns to work. When we meet, Jolie has taken a few days off from filming to travel to Cannes to promote A Mighty Heart, which is based on the book by Mariane Pearl, telling the story of the kidnap and murder of her husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, by Islamic terrorists in 2002. Pitt, who serves as a producer on the film but doesn’t appear in it, is taking a back seat — it’s his turn to look after the children.

Jolie’s priority is clearly motherhood, and she strives to retain a bedrock of values. “You know, I always wanted to adopt kids. My mother used to say that I talked about it when I was a little girl. And I’ve always wanted a big family. And Brad’s the same. We are enjoying the children together.... When I work, Brad stays at home with the kids and vice versa. So it’s all about scheduling. Fortunately, they love travelling, so we go everywhere as a family. I kind of feel that our home is wherever we are.”

The children are still too young to take in all the fuss and the fact that Mum and Dad happen to be two of the biggest sex symbols on the planet. “Yeah, that’ll make them laugh. To them we’re two of the dorkiest people on the planet…”

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, A Mighty Heart was Jolie’s most challenging role yet, a far more serious piece than some of the films she is better known for — Lara Croft, or the frothy action thriller Mr and Mrs Smith, in which she co-starred with Pitt and where they first got together. “Do I think about destiny? A bit. I don’t live my life by it. But yes, we’ve talked about how we first met and that our lives would certainly have been different if we hadn’t have been cast together on that one.”