Brad Pitt bought his partner Angelina Jolie a motorcycle for her recent 35th birthday - and he's spent the subsequent weeks teaching the actress how to ride it.

The Oscar-winner celebrated turning 35 on June 4, 2010 with a low-key barbecue at the couple's mansion in Los Feliz, California.

Jolie has revealed the surprise of the day came when Pitt presented her with a red MV Augusta bike, and she's enjoyed learning how to handle the vehicle with the help of her doting partner.

She tells Britain's Mail on Sunday, "I'm not sure what cc it is. But I can tell you it's a proper bike and it's powerful. I used to have a bike years ago, but I hadn't owned one for a long time. Brad's a really good teacher - he's really patient. I'm very impatient so I can wreck a bike if I'm not careful. Sometimes we'll go on the track together and there you can go really fast and let your hair down."



Meanwhile Angie reveals why she turned down playing a Bond girl:

"They wanted me to play a Bond girl in Casino Royale. I said, 'Actually, I'd prefer to play him; I'd rather be Bond.' It was a joke - kind of. It was an interesting conversation.

"Salt is nothing like Bond. In so many spy films women are femme fatales and we wanted to avoid that. My character doesn't use her sexuality to get anything. It's the roughest I've looked. When we fight, it gets ugly. Somebody breaks my nose in the film. It's not pretty.

"I think when people write things for women - at least with the films I've done in the past, such as Tomb Raider - they're not serious. They're not raw. They're not hard. So when we wanted a real female action hero, we looked towards something that wasn't written for a woman."