Angelina Jolie has never hidden how much losing her mother broke her heart. Marcheline Bertrand died in 2007 at just 56 after an eight-year fight with ovarian and breast cancer, and almost twenty years later the pain is still right there on the surface.
This weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, while doing a Q&A after the premiere of her new film Couture, someone in the audience asked Angelina what message of hope she would give to people currently battling cancer. That’s when she completely choked up.
Through tears, she shared a memory that clearly still hurts:
“One thing I always think about is something my mom said near the end. We’d had a nice dinner with friends and everyone kept asking her, ‘How are you feeling? How’s the cancer?’ And afterwards she turned to me and said, ‘All anybody ever asks me about is cancer.’
So if you love someone going through it, please remember to ask them about everything else in their life too. They’re still the same whole person, and they’re still living.”
It was such a simple, human thing, but you could feel the whole auditorium go quiet. Sometimes the smallest reminders of how we unintentionally make sick people feel defined by their illness hit the hardest.
Angelina was incredibly close to her mom. After Marcheline split from Jon Voight when Angelina was tiny, it was just the three of them (Marcheline, Angelina and her brother James) against the world. Marcheline gave up her own acting dreams to raise her kids, and Angelina has always said her mom was the most selfless person she ever knew.
When Marcheline was diagnosed in 1999, Angelina was only 24. Watching her mother go through treatment, then remission, then the cancer coming back worse, changed her forever. In 2013, after discovering she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation that gave her an 87% chance of breast cancer, Angelina chose preventative double mastectomy, and later had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed too. She’s been open that it was 100% about not putting her own six children through what she went through with her mom.
“I can tell my children they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer,” she wrote at the time, and doctors later said her very public decision triggered thousands more women to get tested; they even called it the “Angelina Effect.”
Seventeen years after her mom’s death, Angelina still talks about her in the present tense sometimes, like she’s just in the next room. At one point in the Q&A she smiled through the tears and added softly, “She only got to meet a few of her grandchildren… and she would have been the most incredible grandmother.”
It’s raw, honest moments like these that remind you celebrities are just people who miss their moms too.