Homemaker or home wrecker?

Jumping off a high-rise while wearing black dominatrix gear and sky-high stiletto heels? It’s all in a day’s work for Angelina Jolie.

But navigating her way around a kitchen? That presented a bigger problem for the domestically challenged actress, who plays a bored assassin/housewife in the comedic thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” opening today.

“Angie does not have the homemaker thing going,” laughs Akiva Goldsman, a producer on the movie.

“There’s a scene where she kicks the oven door closed behind her. I showed her how to do that. She looked at me as though I had showed her that you could create gold out of thin air. The idea that you could kick an oven door closed was entirely alien to her.”

It’s vintage Jolie, who at age 30 is nothing if not a comely cluster of contradictions.

She’s a tattooed single mom who gives her toddler a mohawk. A humanitarian who happens to act. And the woman branded a home-wrecker in the tabloids for her did-they, didn’t-they relationship with Brad Pitt, who plays her assassin husband.

“She charts her own route, and audiences really appreciate it when you’re not trying to copy someone who came before or trying to be somebody else,” says “Smith” director Doug Liman.

“She wants to take flying lessons, and boom, she’s got her license. She makes no apologies or excuses.”

A goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, she’s equally at home visiting the displaced in eastern Jordan or walking the red carpet in a clingy Celine dress.

The woman who, in her younger years, battled an eating disorder and famously wore a necklace containing a drop of then-husband Billy Bob Thornton’s blood is now by all accounts the doting single mom of adopted son Maddox, 3.

Still, motherhood hasn’t dulled her edges. Jolie freely admits to being a sexual woman who takes lovers when it suits her – while denying that one of them was a still-married Pitt.

She still is considered an A-lister in Hollywood although, with the exception of 2001’s “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” the Oscar winner (best supporting actress in 2000 for “Girl, Interrupted”) has never carried a hit movie.

But her persona is so super-sized, her looks so unique, that her films seem almost an afterthought.

“She is larger than life, but she can’t help it,” says David Edelstein, Slate and NPR’s “Fresh Air” film critic. “Even her name is mythic. She’s a magnificently sexual creature, is a little nuts and isn’t afraid to let her roles consume her.”

“Women identify with her because she seems smart and independent and empowered,” adds “Smith” screenwriter Simon Kinberg. “Men are attracted to her because she happens to be incredibly beautiful – and playful.”

Talk to anyone who knows Jolie, and you’ll hear nearly identical descriptions of their first impressions: Without the buffer of having a protective personal publicist or bodyguard, Jolie looks you straight in the eye, shakes your hand and asks about you.

“She’s not a cold or divisive person,” says Estee Lauder makeup artist Paul Starr, who has worked on Jolie since 1998’s “Gia” and features her in his upcoming book, “Paul Starr on Beauty: Conversations with Thirty Celebrated Women.”

“She comes in without an entourage. There’s no assistant or publicist. She’s extremely professional and shows up three minutes before the call time. She knows her job.”

As for her relationship with Pitt during the shoot, all involved say it was extremely “professional.”

In an interview in the July issue of Marie Claire magazine, Jolie quashes tales of an on-set fling with her co-star – then still with wife Jennifer Aniston, who has since filed for divorce.

“To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive,” she says. “I could not, could not, look at myself in the morning if I did that.”

Jolie lives with Maddox outside London rather than in the Tinseltown celebrity fishbowl. She remains estranged from her father, actor Jon Voight, who accused her on television of having “extreme problems.”

When Maddox asked for spiky hair while attending the Venice Film Festival with Jolie last autumn, she obliged, recalls Vicky Jenson, who directed Jolie in last year’s animated hit “Shark Tale.”

“She’s very loving with him,” Jenson says. “She encouraged him to say ‘Hi’ to people but didn’t push him. He’d get shy and hide under her hair.”

The twice-divorced Jolie, on the other hand, never appears bashful. There she goes, posing with Pitt on the cover of the July issue of W magazine even as rumors about them reach a fever pitch.

And she knows nothing about pop culture or ever reads the tabloids that follow her life and loves, says “Smith” producer Goldsman.

“She doesn’t gossip, and she’s weirdly culturally removed,” he says. “She doesn’t waste her energy on silliness. You’ll never find common ground with her based on what’s on TV or what’s in the tabloids.”

She also doesn’t seem particularly attuned to her stunning beauty, from the bodacious lips to the catlike eyes and eye-poppingly curvy body.

“I don’t think she realizes how genetically blessed she is,” says Marie Claire editor Rebecca Shalam. “I don’t think she’s aware of the effect she has on men and women. She’s thinking about getting aid to Ethiopia and not necessarily about, ‘Oh, are they going to say I have a 26-inch waist or do I need liposuction.’ “

Shannon Boyd, manager of the UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and Special Events Programs, has worked with Jolie for four years and calls her “very engaged” and “courageous.”

The actress is in contact with the U.N. on a nearly daily basis and, as soon as her schedule opens, is willing to go on another mission, Boyd says.

“We treat her as a colleague,” he says. “She sleeps on colleagues’ sofas, and if all we have is a spare floor, she does that. She gets her half-liter of water to go on a long jeep ride in 100-degree weather if that’s what everyone else has.”

In addition to her 20-plus missions, Jolie has donated substantial amounts of money to the organization and “has paid her own way since Day One,” Boyd says.

But she’s the antithesis of the ponderous pontificator you dread sitting next to at a dinner party.

“For someone as dedicated to very serious things in the world, she has the ability to really laugh at stuff,” says screenwriter Kinberg.

“Her sense of humor is mature, sophisticated. She understands irony and has wryness and doesn’t take herself that seriously. When you’re working with her, you don’t feel like you’re working with Kofi Annan.”