Angelina Jolie on Motherhood, Marital Issues, and Why She Can’t Wait to Turn 50

• Most women in Hollywood start to stress once they’ve hit the wrong side of 25, but Angelina Jolie is not most women. Faced with a daunting family history of cancer, the movie star/director/mother of six made the brave decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy, and followed that surgery up two years later with another surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes — a procedure she knew would send her into early menopause. At the time of the second operation, she was also starring in a movie with her husband — their first together in a decade — that she wrote and directed. So, you know, no pressure there.

  Shortly after she underwent the second operation, Jolie penned an op-ed in the New York Times to share her story with the world. It turned out that exposing this part of her life had a somewhat healing effect on the actress turned activist.

  “It really connected me to other women,” she explains in the November issue of Vogue. “I wish my mom had been able to make those choices,” she added, recounting how painful it was watching her mother suffer. “The specific grief came from the woman I was closest to, seeing her art slip away, her body fail her.” Still, opting to take such drastic measures wasn’t something Jolie went into lightly.

 

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