It continued as she directed her first film, In the Land of Blood and Honey, a love story set in war-torn Bosnia, and insisted on casting only local actors playing their own ethnicity. “It couldn’t be anyone else,” she told Vanity Fair. “It’s their story. It was important that they were willing to do it. If none of them were willing, I wouldn’t have made it.” As her family continued to be photographed in exotic locales doing various edifying activities: going to the aquarium in Sydney, riding on a boat in the Galapagos, frolicking on the grounds of a castle in Scotland, going to see Wicked in London. As she started wearing a sizable ring and confirming the engagement only through Pitt’s publicist, who said, “It is a promise for the future and their kids are very happy. There’s no date set at this time.” As she offered just enough of herself, and her private life, to keep the public interested. Never too many images or interviews; never a danger of oversaturation. Just enough, in other words, to make you feel grateful each time you had the opportunity for more.

Over the winter and spring, however, there was a relative lack of Jolie content. She appeared in Jordan in her capacity as a UNHCR Special Envoy to raise awareness about Syrian refugees in December; honored her cinematographer Dean Semler at the American Society for Cinematographers Awards in February; visited the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda to advocate against the use of rape as a tool of war in March; spoke at the Women of the World Summit and the G-8 in April. For anyone else, that’s a busy four months; for Jolie, it’s a relative pittance of public appearance.

But then, a bombshell: She’d been out of the spotlight because she’d been preparing for, and then undergoing, a double mastectomy. Another celebrity would reveal that kind of information through a magazine cover — which is what Michael J. Fox did with the news of his Parkinson’s disease, how Patrick Swayze chose to confirm his battle with pancreatic cancer, and what Guiliana Rancic did two years earlier with the news of her own double mastectomy.

Jolie was certainly no stranger to sanctioned People magazine covers — but there was a grander narrative at stake, and she had something else in mind. The narrative of illness (or, in Jolie’s case, pre-illness) and affliction is almost always rooted in the personal: Here is how I feel; here is how it affects my family. Gossip and fan magazines have always turned celebrity struggles into melodrama, engendering the sort of sympathy and/or empathy that further connects the reader to the star image.

But Jolie wasn’t interested in melodrama. Instead, she wrote an editorial for the New York Times, couching the news in the selfsame rhetoric of advocacy and awareness that had structured the rest of her non-Hollywood labor. She plainly explained that she was a carrier of the BRCA1 gene and that her doctors estimated an 87% risk of breast cancer and 50% risk of ovarian cancer; she narrated the process of the removal in explicit, unflinching detail, from the “nipple delay” procedure to reconstruction surgery eight weeks later.

The editorial was titled “My Medical Choice,” but the message was about universal awareness. As she explained, “Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live.”

“For any woman reading this,” she continued, “I hope it helps you to know that you have options.”

As Jolie said at the end of her editorial, “I chose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer,” which is another way of saying, “I chose to take this scary thing and use my privilege to make it so that less women might have to experience it.” It reads as benevolent, altruistic, and fundamentally good — the very opposite of how we generally think of celebrity culture, and the dozens of proliferating stories, blog posts, tweets, and cover stories affirm just how effectively she communicated the message.

That message wouldn’t have such unambiguous clarity, however, without precise planning. All the doctor's appointments, surgeries, and recoveries — all of the potential leaks — were anticipated and controlled, allowing Jolie to completely control the narrative. And that sort of control allowed Jolie, with Pitt firmly beside her, to likewise control the meaning — of the procedure and its ramifications on her career, of course, but also her image at large. In the years prior, the gossip press had come to refer to her as “Saint Angelina” — and this became one more justification for her beatification.

And all of this was accomplished, recall, without a publicist. As Bonnie Fuller said back in 2008, “She’s scary smart,” with “an amazing knack, perhaps more than any other star, for knowing how to shape a public image.”

In the year since the Times editorial, Jolie has been in full movie star gear: filming Maleficent, appearing with Pitt during the publicity tour for World War Z, and, most significantly, directing her second feature, Unbroken. Unlike The Land of Milk and Honey, Unbroken is a classic Hollywood prestige picture. Based on the real-life travails of Louis Zamperini that had been adapted, in 2010, by Laura Hillenbrand into a best-selling book, its plot reads like an Academy Awards checklist: athletic triumph, World War II, lost at sea, time as prisoner of war, and based on a true story, with the protagonist still alive.

The script had been bouncing around Hollywood for decades, but it took Hillenbrand’s adaptation, plus some script work by Joel and Ethan Coen, to put it into filmable shape. A short clip aired during the 2014 Winter Olympics, and, with a December release date, its fate will be markedly more high-profile than Jolie’s previous directorial effort. In short, Unbroken seems poised to finally legitimate Jolie’s artistic ambitions — which, when coupled with the certain blockbuster success of Maleficent, situates her as the most enviable female star in Hollywood.

In the lead-up to the release of Maleficent, however, Jolie has given dozens of interviews, with a recurring emphasis on a career pivot away from acting in order to focus on directing, writing, and her work for the U.N. and the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative. But that doesn’t mean that her role as a celebrity — and the masterful management thereof — has faded. When asked about whether she feels guilt as a working mother, Jolie’s response was an object lesson in effective PR:

I’m not a single mom with two jobs trying to get by every day. I have much more support than most people, most women in this world. And I have the financial means to have a home and health care and food. When I feel I’m doing too much, I do less, if I can. And that’s why I’m in a rare position where I don’t have to do job after job. I can take time when my family needs it. I actually feel that women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain. Consider all the people who really struggle and don’t have the financial means, don’t have the support, and many people are single raising children. That’s hard.

Jolie’s words have been reframed as a sublimated critique of Gwyneth Paltrow, who sparked critique when she suggested that her schedule was more difficult than that of a mother with an office job.

It’s unlikely, however, that Jolie was targeting Paltrow, or any specific celebrity. Purposefully or not, she directly addressed the animosity levied not only at celebrities. They may be beautiful, and act beautifully, and provide us with objects of lust and desire — emotions whose flip side has always been jealousy and resentment. Those feelings fuel the particular and complex schadenfreude we feel watching celebrities fail, suffer, and implode, and it’s the primary engine of the snarkiest and darkest side of the gossip industry. And every time a celebrity says that it’s hard being pretty, or difficult having your photo taken all the time, or exhausting attending movie premieres, or sitting in hair and makeup, or posing for magazine covers, it engenders just a bit more spite, which makes it all the easier to quietly revel in that celebrity’s demise.

But with a quote like that, Jolie does something different. Instead of attempting to make herself seem “just like us,” she acknowledges the gap; instead of empathizing, or comparing her struggle to others', she underlines just how difficult it is not only for most of her fans, but most of the world. As gossip columnist and CTV host Elaine Lui explains, “She doesn’t allow herself to be quoted about how hard her life is ... She’s figured out that celebrities can never get away with moaning — especially not now, in these times, when almost everyone has it worse.”