Oprah, Bono Top Celeb Philanthropists

Celebrities may make a lot of money. But they're also good at giving it away.

Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and Angelina Jolie top Forbes.com 's list of Hollywood's 10 most generous entertainers, donating a collective $58 million over the last two years to respective causes, most notably disaster relief in the wake of the devastating Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

Citing numbers from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Forbes.com reports that the daytime talk queen doled out a whopping $52 million in charitable donations in 2005 alone. She gave total of $36 million to her Oprah Winfrey Foundation, which supports women and children's programs. An additional $3.5 million went to Oprah's Angel Network, which she founded in 1998 to encourage fans and fellow celebs to be more philanthropic. And last but not least, Winfrey gave $10 million to aid victims ravaged by Katrina last year.

Spielberg, meanwhile, wrote two checks worth $1.5 million each to aid in the post-tsumani and post-Katrina recovery. The Schindler's List previously established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to archive first-person accounts by Holocaust survivors and the Righteous Person Foundation to donate his earnings from the Oscar-winning movie to various Jewish causes.

Coincidentally, Winfrey and Spielberg recently topped Forbes' list of billionaire entertainers.

As for Jolie, the Oscar winner has become as well known for her activism on behalf of refugees as her ongoing tabloid affair with Brad Pitt. Aside from traveling the globe visiting refugee camps as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Jolie shelled out more than $3 million to various refugee agencies last year.

Arnold Schwarzenegger annually says hasta la vista to mucho dinero to help bankroll the Special Olympics, which was founded by mother-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and After School All-Stars, the program he's routinely plugged as California's governor. His 2001 donations totaled more than $4.1 million, mostly divvied up between those charities, the Twin Towers Fund and Nelson Mandela's children's fund.

Celine Dion ponied up more than $1 million to the American Red Cross' disaster relief fund following Hurricane Katrina. She also has donated proceeds from select performances of her Las Vegas concerts to the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (her niece died of the disease) and other causes.

Ditto Sandra Bullock, who gave million-dollar donations to relief efforts following the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the tsunami disaster. Paul and Heather McCartney contributed $1.9 million to tsunami victims and regularly make headlines campaigning on behalf of the Adopt-A-Minefield charity and various animal rights initiatives.

Nicolas Cage gave $1 million to Katrina relief. He also regularly supports Chrysalis, a Los Angeles nonprofit aiding the homeless.

Jackie Chan made the list for his eponymous foundation, which helps at-risk youngsters in Hong Kong. He donated $64,000 to UNICEF for tsunami relief in 2004 and helped organize a mammoth telethon featuring some of Asia's most popular celebs. He has also contributed $100,000 to Chrysalis.

Finally, a no-brainer on the list is U2 frontman Bono, who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and named Time magazine's Co-Person of the Year for his tireless advocacy of Third World causes.

In 2002, he helped launch DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa) that lobbies industrial nations to help fight poverty and AIDS in Africa. U2 and McCartney were also among the headliners of last summer's Live 8 concerts aiming to raise awareness of such issues.

Speaking of DATA, Matt Damon just returned to the U.S. from a trip to Africa sponsored by the group to see exactly how American funds are being used.

Damon said he also wanted to highlight the work being done there by such other groups as the African Development Foundation, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and galvanize wider support.

"To see so much hope from people who have so little made this an inspiring and life changing journey for me," said Damon in a statement. "The promises America and other rich countries have made to Africa must be more than words. Those promises need to put hopeful children in school; help parents put roofs over the heads of their children; and get life saving AIDS medicine to the patients who need them now."

Damon's Ocean's Eleven costar George Clooney just came back from a fact-finding trip to Darfur to help shift attention to the plight of the refugees fleeing the ongoing genocide there. The thesp has urged his fellow Americans to attend public rallies over the next few weeks to pressure the Bush administration to make good on its promise to help end the violence there.

"What we cannot do is turn our heads and look away and hope that this will somehow disappear," Clooney told reporters at a packed news conference at the National Press Club. "It's the first genocide of the 21st century."

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