Angelina Jolie arrives in Japan’s Narita International Airport in 2010 alongside her four eldest children: Pax, Zahara, Shilo and Maddox (far L). Photograph: Reuters

He's the lucky Cambodian son hand-picked by Hollywood royalty – the adopted child of the film star Angelina Jolie, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, turned 11 years old yesterday.

Cambodian well-wishers posted messages online in tribute to the boy. Internet users on the local blog Sabay wished him good health.

Maddox, who was originally known as Rath Vibol, was adopted from an orphanage in the country at seven months old.

He is the eldest child of Jolie and her fiancé, actor Brad Pitt.

They went to the orphanage in 2002 while she was in Cambodia filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and also working as a goodwill ambassador of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

A year after the adoption she set up the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation in Battambang province, a project dedicated to community development and environmental preservation.

The adoption caused controversy in the United States when allegations were made that the actress paid Maddox’s birth parents to give him up.

The orphanage in Cambodia said that his parents had passed away and nobody has come forward claiming to be his original parents.

Although Jolie and her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton announced the adoption together, she adopted Maddox as a single parent before she met actor Brad Pitt in 2005.

The couple announced their engagement in April. They have three adopted children, Maddox, Pax, Zahara, and three biological children, Shiloh, Knox, and Vivienne.

To contact the reporter on this story: Roth Meas at [email protected]