The usually publicity shy Angelina Jolie has opened up about marriage, her six children, and her experimental twenties in a rare interview with ELLE magazine.

The 38-year-old star of the upcoming Maleficent film has posed for the тιтle’s cover, and reveals that she and fiance Brad Pitt are now ‘more interested in each other’ than ever before.

PH๏τographed by Saint Laurent designer Hedi Slimane in the brand’s sharp black-and-white clothes, Ms Jolie also revealed that she never thought she would find true love – and that her wild-child youth was publicly ‘misinterpreted as [me] wanting to be rebellious.’

The mother-of-six says that her nine-year relationship with Brad Pitt, as well as their large family, still surprises her.

‘I never thought I’d have children, I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person,’ Ms Jolie, who has been divorced twice, said. ‘Having come from a broken home—you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.’

She says that rather than becoming uninterested in each other, her relationship with Mr Pitt, whom she got engaged to in April 2012, has evolved over time.

‘You get together and you’re two individuals and you feel inspired by each other, you challenge each other, you complement each other, drive each other beautifully crazy,’ she explained of their dynamic.

‘After all these years, we have history—and when you have history with somebody, you’re friends in such a very real, deep way that there’s such a comfort, and an ease, and a deep love that comes from having been through quite a lot together,’ she added.

While Ms Jolie was no wallflower in her youth, she does feel that her famous antics, which included kissing her brother James Haven on the Oscars red carpet in 2000 and carrying ex-husband Billy Bob’s blood around her neck on the red carpet, were misinterpreted.

She said that they came from a place that was not about ‘a need to be destructive or rebellious—it’s that need to find a full voice, to push open the walls around you.’

She says that as a young, curious person ‘you want to be free. And as you start to feel that you are being corralled into a certain life, you kind of push against it. It may come out very strange, it may be interpreted wrong, but you’re trying to find out who you are.’

Because she started working as an actress as the ripe age of seven, Ms Jolie says that her many scheduled engagements left her with a fear of leading ‘a life half-lived.’

‘I realized that very young—that a life where you don’t live to your full potential, or you don’t experiment, or you’re afraid, or you hesitate, or there are things you know you should do but you just don’t get around to them, is a life that I’d be miserable living, and the only way to feel that I’m on the right path is just to be true to myself, whatever that may be, and that tends to come with stepping out of something that’s maybe safe or traditional,’ she added.

It’s interesting then, that Ms Jolie cast three of her children – Vivienne, Pax, and Zahara (whom she calls ZZ) – in her latest film Maleficent, which comes out on May 28.

She says that this decision came about because Vivienne seemed like the perfect child to be cast as a young Aurora – but that she would prefer her children pick any career but acting.

‘Brad and I made the decision that we wouldn’t keep them from sets and the fun of making movies, but we wouldn’t [glorify it either]—we wouldn’t make it a good thing or a bad thing,’ she said.

‘But I would really prefer they do something else. [Anyway] after two days of it, Brad and I were so stressed we never wanted to do it again,’ she joked.

Luckily for them, daughter Shiloh opted out of a role in the film. ‘I asked Shiloh about being Aurora, and she laughed in my face. She said she’d be a horned creature,’ Ms Jolie said.