At 51, while most Hollywood A-listers are busy adding square footage in Beverly Hills, Angelina Jolie is fussing over a very different kind of real estate: a 39-hectare patch of Cambodian forest that used to be littered with landmines and poachers’ snares. Think less infinity pool, more ranger station.
The estate, tucked into Battambang province near the Thai border, has become the front porch to one of Southeast Asia’s more ambitious conservation experiments. From that private base, Jolie’s Maddox Foundation helps protect a public forest roughly 1,500 times larger – a landscape about the size of Chicago – while trying to keep both endangered wildlife and 57,000 human neighbors alive and thriving.
A Hollywood Shoot That Changed Everything
Jolie did not randomly drop a pin on Cambodia. At the start of the 2000s, she flew in to film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider among the temples of Angkor. The trip was supposed to be an action-movie backdrop; instead, it rewired her life. Confronted with the aftershocks of war, poverty and unexploded landmines, she left with more than a box-office hit.
Within a year of that shoot, Jolie was appointed a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, and in 2002 she adopted Ma...