Jolie arrives in Vietnam to adopt child

15/03/2007 03:56

HO CHI MINH CITY (Reuters) - Hollywood star Angelina Jolie arrived in Vietnam on Wednesday to adopt a Vietnamese boy from an orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City.

Two Vietnamese online newspapers published reports and photographs of Jolie, 31, in a vehicle in the southern city after her arrival at the airport.

Jolie and partner Brad Pitt have one biological child and two adopted children. The Vietnamese boy, described by officials in the communist-run country as a healthy 3- to 4-year-old, would be the fourth for the movie-star family.

"All they need now is a signature from the vice mayor of Ho Chi Minh City to give the final approval," said Vietnam’s top adoption official, Vu Duc Long, who is director of the International Adoption Department.

Sources familiar with the Jolie case said she would attend a "giving and receiving" ceremony with Vietnamese officials in the southern city on Thursday. The U.S. consulate would issue the child a passport to travel to the United States.

Jolie, 31, filed adoption papers in early March through an unidentified American agency without her partner Brad Pitt because under Vietnamese law, an unmarried couple may not adopt a child. Single people may adopt children under the law.

In Vietnam, adoptions have been known to take as little as one month if background checks and issues of whether .....continued below

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the adopting family can support a child are quickly resolved.

However, the process can take six months or longer in some cases.

Long had said the child was a boy aged between 3 and 4 years from the Tam Binh orphanage in the city of eight million people, Vietnam’s largest urban area.

VNExpress online newspaper quoted orphanage director Nguyen Van Trung as saying the boy was healthy and liked to play soccer. The child had been abandoned at a local hospital and was admitted to the orphanage in 2003, Trung added.

Jolie and Pitt visited Ho Chi Minh City last November and met children at the orphanage. They have one biological child, Shiloh Nouvel who was born last year, and two adopted children -- son Maddox from Cambodia and daughter Zahara from Ethiopia.

Jolie and Pitt, who starred in the 2005 movie "Mr. & Mrs. Smith", have said they have no plans to marry but are committed to raising their children together. They are also working together on the film "A Mighty Heart" about the killing of a U.S. journalist by Pakistani militants.

Jolie won an Oscar in 1999 for best supporting actress in "Girl, Interrupted". She starred in the 2001 movie "Tomb Raider" which was filmed in Cambodia, neighbouring Vietnam.

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