Oscar winner Angelina Jolie had the twins by caesarean section on Saturday evening at the Lenval hospital on the glamorous Promenade des Anglais waterfront drive in Nice.

Miss Jolie arrived at the Lenval hospital in late June, provoking a media circus with photographers desperate for a picture of the mother-to-be. Though, the bidding war has already begun for the first photos of Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, the “world’s most famous children.”

French newspapers have reported that an American magazine has already offered $20m for the first and exclusive images of the new babies – with all the money going to a worthy cause.

“I’ve never known a set of pictures to be worth this amount of money,” said Darryn Lyons, owner of Big Pictures, a celebrity photo agency in London. The only other photos that “would possibly come that close is Britney Spears giving birth to an alien”, he said.

Angelina Jolie is expected to stay and rest at the exclusive Lenval hospital in Nice for the next few days and is already enjoying specially couriered-in food for her stay. The actress is then expected to depart as she arrived – in a helicopter taking off from the roof of the building, most likely in the dead of night to avoid being photographed.

The arrival of the twins brings the couple’s family to six. They are already parents to three adopted children: Cambodian boy Maddox, six, Vietnamese boy Pax Thien, four, and Ethiopian girl Zahara, three.
Their natural daughter Shiloh was born in Namibia in 2006. After her birth, the couple auctioned off the photo shoot to People magazine in the US and Hello! in Britain for $10m with an undisclosed charity benefiting.

The mayor, Christian Estrosi, seized the opportunity to promote his city by arriving at the hospital to sign the birth certificates wearing a smart suit and full make-up for the TV cameras.