Angelina Jolie: The kindest thing anyone has ever done is share their biscuits with me

Angelina Jolie says the kindest thing anyone has ever done for her is given her some “biscuits”.

The ‘Maleficent’ star recalled the time a young girl shared her sweet treats with her while she was visiting the Syrian border, and said the kind gesture meant so much to her because the little girl wasn’t “thinking of herself” despite everything she had been through.

Angelina said: “This little girl came up to me and offered me some biscuits that she had in her pocket. Knowing what she’d come from, knowing what she was heading into, knowing everything she’d experienced, yet in that moment she wasn’t thinking of herself or everything she had lost.

“She wasn’t sitting with self-pity. She just saw me – I must have looked tired and she just walked over and thought to just be kind. That’s what makes human beings so wonderful.”

The 46-year-old actress has been taking part in humanitarian efforts for more than two decades, and says her trips to countries ravaged by war and poverty have “benefited” her “spirit”.

She explained: “My spirit has benefited, my life has benefited, from being allowed to be in the company of people who are surviving very difficult things. It’s been a gift to me. I don’t like the idea that it’s some burden, that it’s so nice of somebody to go out of their way to help somebody else. It’s not. I don’t ever see this idea of charity.”

And Angelina says one of the most valuable lessons she ever learned was from an Afghan grandmother.

Speaking to People magazine, she said: “She was raising her grandchildren because her children had been murdered and she was in a refugee camp. I remember I started to cry and she said, ‘I don’t need you to cry, I need you to help me.’ That was a big lesson. The thought that sitting and feeling sorry for somebody is this luxury because you can be in your feelings and they don’t have that time to feel sorry for themselves.”