PARIS(AP)
Angelina Jolie has left the building. Oh, and so have the twins.
Before dawn Saturday, the Hollywood superstar and her newborn twins
left the French Riviera hospital where she gave birth a week ago,
the hospital said in a statement.
"The mother and her babies are doing very well,"
reported the Fondation Lenval hospital, located in the southern
Mediterranean city of Nice.
Jolie slipped out at 4 a.m. Saturday with the twins, Knox Leon
and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt, deftly evading most of the
paparazzi who have followed the family for months in southern
France, ever since Jolie arrived for the Cannes film festival in
May. It was not immediately clear if the twins' father, actor
Brad Pitt, was with them.
AP Television cameras outside the hospital filmed a large white
van with tinted windows leaving one of the hospital's back
entrances at that time. No other vehicles left the hospital for the
next several hours.
Jolie, 33, checked into the hospital on July 2 and delivered the
babies by Cesarian section ten days later. Knox Leon weighed 5.03
pounds and the Vivienne Marcheline 5 pounds.
Jolie's obstetrician, Dr. Michel Sussmann, told reporters
after the birth that the 44-year-old Pitt was at Jolie's side
during the delivery, which he said had been pushed up from its
originally planned date "for medical reasons" so the
babies could be born "in the best conditions."
The Jolie-Pitt clan had rented four rooms on the fifth floor of
the maternity ward of the Lenval hospital, appropriately located on
Nice's beach-front California Avenue. The hospital had treated
the mirrored blue windows of Jolie's room, which looked out the
Mediterranean, with a special material that blocked telephoto
lenses from peering in.
Jolie managed to check into the hospital unobserved, reportedly
arriving by helicopter on the hospital's rooftop helipad. That
fueled rumors she would also leave the clinic by helicopter,
In its statement, the Fondation Lenval thanked the Jolie-Pitts
for choosing its hospital. It also thanked the hospital staff
"for the attention and care they paid to the family" and
the "journalists around the hospital who did their best to
respect their privacy."
The Nice-Matin newspaper has reported that an unnamed U.S.
publication has paid $11 million for exclusive rights to the first
photos of the Jolie-Pitt twins and that the proceeds will go to
charity.
Jolie and Pitt have four other children _ Maddox, 6; Pax, 4;
Zahara, 3; and Shiloh, 2. Before Jolie checked into the hospital in
Nice, the family set up a household in Correns, 60 miles away.
Jolie's latest film, the thriller "Wanted" with
James McAvoy, has racked up $112 million in its first three weeks
in the United States. The action flick _ about a secret society of
assassins stars Jolie as a gun-toting sexpot _ opened last week in
France.
The new mother also stars in director Clint Eastwood's
"Changeling," a 1930s-era drama about a kidnapping that
premiered at Cannes this year. Jolie also did voiceovers for the
animated comedy "Kung Fu Panda," which has brought in
over $200 million this summer in U.S. ticket sales alone.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.