Angelina Jolie opened up about her scars caused by a double mastectomy. On Monday, the actress graced the red carpet at the Paris premiere of her upcoming movie, Couture. In the movie, she plays a character who is diagnosed with breast cancer, something Jolie understands well. As she began her movie press tour, Jolie spoke with French Inter and discussed her double mastectomy.
Angelina Jolie underwent a preventive double mastectomy in February 2013. In May that year, the Oscar-winning actress wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which she shared that her mother succumbed to cancer at the age of 56. The actress mentioned that she carries a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which puts her at risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
“My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer,” she wrote.
Angelina Jolie added that after she became aware of the risk, she proactively decided to “minimize” it and had a preventive double mastectomy.
Speaking to the French media outlet, Jolie said that she had always been a person “interested in the scars.”
“I’m not drawn to some perfect idea of a life that has no scars. So no, I think, hey, you know, I see my scars are a choice I made to do what I could do to stay here as long as I could with my children. I love my scars because of that,” Jolie said.
Jolie added that she is grateful that she had the opportunity to proactively prevent a health hazard. The actress stressed that she lost her mother at a young age and is raising her children “without a grandmother.”
“So for me, no, I think this is life. And if you get to the end of your life and you haven’t made, you haven’t made mistakes, you haven’t made a mess, you don’t have scars, you haven’t lived a full enough life, I think,” the Oscar-winner added.
In her op-ed, Angelina Jolie noted that due to her mastectomy, her risk of breast cancer was reduced from 87 percent to five percent.
Angelina Jolie had her ovaries removed two years after her double mastectomy
In 2015, Angelina Jolie wrote another op-ed for the New York Times and shared that she had taken another preventive surgery and had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. She explained that following a test, the doctor told her that the test revealed certain markers that could be a sign of early cancer.
The Oscar-winning actress, who lost her mother, grandmother, and aunt to cancer, went to see a surgeon who treated her mother. She took another test to check for cancer signs in her body. While the tumor test was negative, she went ahead with the surgery as a preventive measure.
“There was still a chance of early-stage cancer, but that was minor compared with a full-blown tumor. To my relief, I still had the option of removing my ovaries and fallopian tubes, and I chose to do it,” Jolie wrote.
Angelina Jolie plays the role of a filmmaker in the Alice Winocour–directed film, Couture. According to People magazine, the movie will hit French theaters on February 18.
Edited by Anuj Singh Kushwaha
