The $15m babies: Brangelina's bundles of joy

For a woman devoted to her tattoos, film career and very public relationship with Brad Pitt, the Lenval hospital in Nice must have seemed like the perfect choice to Angelina Jolie when she sat down to choose a suitable location to bring two new members of her constantly-expanding family into the world.

Not only does it boast a rooftop helipad, from which any sufficiently-wealthy expectant mother can be airlifted, the hospital's location will also provide a fresh adornment for Jolie's left shoulder, on which she sports tattooed map co-ordinates of the places where her four existing children were born.

The Lenval's Santa Maria maternity clinic was also willing to provide an entire suite of four rooms on the fifth floor of the building for the so-called "Brangelina" party and their entourage. The rooms have been sealed off by bodyguards and boast stunning views across the French Riviera resort.

Yesterday, the building was surrounded by a small squadron of satellite vans and several hundred representatives of the world's media. It made a fitting venue for the closing stages of a pregnancy in which every little development has been stage-managed to dovetail with the competing requirements of Jolie's film career.

For even as her obstetrician, Michel Sussmann, stepped up to address the mountain of microphones at a press conference, Hollywood was celebrating the news that Jolie's new action film Wanted had grossed an astonishing $51m (£25m) on its opening weekend.

As Dr Sussmann admitted that – despite strict French privacy laws – the famous couple had given him the OK to release a few details regarding the forthcoming birth of their twins, France's cinema owners were licking their lips in anticipation of record takings when Wanted hits their screens next week.

"Mrs Angelina Jolie and her husband, Brad Pitt, told me to tell you that she is doing absolutely fine," he said, apparently unaware that the stars are not married. "Her admittance to hospital at this stage in her pregnancy is totally normal for a patient who had a Caesarean during her first pregnancy. She is a patient like any other. She is very well and she is OK."

Dr Sussmann refused to reveal the sex of the babies, which has been subject of conflicting reports in both the British and US press (some say two girls, others a boy and a girl). Neither would he reveal when they would arrive, commenting only: "I can't give you a date. Let's say the birth will happen in the weeks to come."

But his brief appearance was enough to keep the world's media simmering in the frenzied manner it first adopted when Jack Black, Jolie's co-star in Kung Fu Panda, "accidentally" revealed in a joint interview to promote that film that she was expecting twins.

Perhaps that sounds cynical. But it's difficult not to be, amid reports that bidding for magazine rights to the first pictures of Brangelina's new arrivals, in the arms of their 44-year-old father and 33-year-old mother, has passed the $15m mark.

It's difficult not to also wonder if we've been here before. Back in 2006, just as Jolie's film The Good Shepherd was about to hit cinemas, the couple travelled to Namibia, for the arrival of their first biological child, a daughter called Shiloh (they have three other adopted children, Zahara, from Ethiopia, Pax from Vietnam, and Maddox from Cambodia).

To international hysteria unprecedented in Namibia – an impoverished country of 1.8 million – the couple installed themselves at a luxury villa complex near the coastal town of Swakopmund for the six weeks leading up to the birth

The couple have "form" for creating a stir. And such was the pressure on local resources that the government was swiftly brow-beaten into handing over control of its international borders and airspace to them.

Journalists and photographers were first welcomed into Namibia, then booted out when their attention became too much and the Prime Minister decided to revoke their visas. A no-fly zone was established over Pitt and Jolie's residence, the Burning Shore Beach Lodge, causing questions to be asked in the country's parliament.

Eventually, an imported doctor, Jason Rothbart, carried out the Caesarean section at the nearby Welwitschia hospital, while Pitt took on duties for cutting the child's umbilical chord. It was named Shiloh Nouvel, which is Hebrew for "new messiah," and christening gifts included a 14-carat gold dummy, reportedly worth £7,000.

As the humanitarian organisation Care noted at the time, that money would allow 61,000 people to eat for a day, feed 400 Namibian families for a month, and allow 77 of them to start small poultry businesses.

That may, in fairness, have been a case of sour grapes. Pitt and Jolie have always made generous donations to charities, many of them working in the field of international aid. They also carry out plenty of work to publicise the problems faced by inhabitants of some of the impoverished nations from which they have adopted children.

In March, it emerged they had funnelled more than $4m each to a foundation they set up to aid causes around the world. Last month, meanwhile, they donated $1m to support the education of 8,000 children in Iraq and the United States who have been affected by war.

Jolie, who became a household name in 2001 playing Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider series of films, is also an ambassador for the United Nations. Pitt, who rose to prominence after Thelma and Louise, is a later convert to charity work.

Still, the celebrity circus that has arrived on the French Riviera attests to the couple's enduring fascination to audiences across the world, a fascination evident in their continual appearances in magazine lists of the "most glamorous" couples in showbusiness.

At the Cannes film festival in May, Jolie confirmed that she intended to give birth to the twins in France and, shortly afterwards, took up residence in a rented 17th-century chateau in Correns, a village in Provence, which they had been offered by an American acquaintance.

After the town's mayor had confirmed the existence of his celebrity guests – he said a helicopter had been seen taking off from the site – speculation had grown that they would choose the Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco for the Caesarean section, a fitting venue for an arrival that is being treated in celebrity circles like a royal birth.

However, the focus of media attention shifted at the weekend, when it emerged that they had instead plumped for a corner room at the Lenval hospital.

Appropriately enough, the hospital is on the city's California Avenue. To the hundreds of reporters who are stationed outside it, the focus of speculation will now shift to two important questions: what the babies will be called, and whether they'll be boys or girls.

The Sun has suggested that a pair of girls had been born on Monday night. The Daily Mirror, for its part, said the new arrivals weren't due until 19 August.

Jolie's tattoo artist, meanwhile, will face a more pressing problem: given that the twins will be born in identical locations, does he add two separate sets of identical map co-ordinates to the actress's upper arm, or will she make do with a single one?