Angelina Jolie at a screening of MTV’s Diary series in New York. (AFP)

New York, Sept. 14 (AP): Ask Angelina Jolie about her children and like any proud mother, she’ll brag about them.

“They give me so much joy, and I want to make a better world for them,” the Oscar-winning actor said in an interview that aired on ABC’s Good Morning America.

Jolie has a four-year-old son Maddox, who was adopted from Cambodia, and a daughter, Zahara, adopted this summer from Ethiopia.

When she brought Zahara home, “she was six months old and not four kg,” the 30-year-old actor said. “Her skin, you could squeeze it, it stuck together. Like it was terrifying. Just to see the difference that food and the right kind of just a little bit of care makes.

“She’s like ? she has gained 2.7 kg. We are calling her chubby. She’s, you know, she’s just a totally different baby.”

Jolie, also a UN goodwill ambassador, says Maddox loves being a big brother. “He came to the orphanage. He saw where she was living, and he saw she needed care. Kids understand sadness and poverty and hunger.”

Jolie was accompanied by Brad Pitt, her Mr & Mrs Smith co-star, when she went to Ethiopia in July to pick up Zahara. Rumours of Pitt and Jolie’s off-screen relationship had been circulating for months.

She appeared on the ABC morning show yesterday, a day before a new MTV documentary chronicling her trip to a village in Kenya with UN adviser and economist Jeffrey Sachs was scheduled to premiere.

The Diary of Angelina Jolie & Dr Jeffrey Sachs in Africa is set to air today, coinciding with the opening of the UN summit in New York.