Angelina Jolie Shares Emotional Comment on Her Double Mastectomy Scars

Angelina Jolie, 50, opened up about the strong feelings she has toward her double mastectomy scars, 13 years after undergoing the preventative procedure.

“My scars are a choice I made to do what I could do to stay here as long as I could with my children,” Jolie told French public radio station France Inter in an interview promoting her new film, Couture. In it, she portrays a filmmaker balancing a demanding career and a breast cancer diagnosis.

She continued, “I love my scars because of that, you know, and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to have the choice to do something proactive about my health.”

“I’ve always been someone more interested in the scars and the life that people carry,” Jolie told the radio station. “I’m not drawn to some perfect idea of a life that has no scars.”

“I think this is life. You get to the end of your life, and 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,” she said.

The Oscar winner revealed her mastectomy scars to the world for the first time in a cover story published by Time France in December 2025.

Jolie is a mother of six with her ex-husband, actor Brad Pitt, including Maddox, 24; Pax, 22; Zahara, 21; Shiloh, 19; Vivienne, 17; and Knox, 17.

Pitt, 62, met Jolie on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2004), and the couple married a decade later in a private ceremony in 2014 with their six kids. Jolie filed for divorce in 2016, and the couple reached a settlement in 2024.

“I lost my mom when I was young, and I’m raising my children without a grandmother,” Jolie said.

Jolie’s late mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1999 and later with breast cancer. Bertrand died in 2007 at the age of 56, when Jolie was 31, due to complications from her cancer. (Pitt’s mother, Jane Etta Pitt, passed away in August 2025 at the age of 84.)

After finding out she carried a BRCA1 gene mutation, which significantly increases a person’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer, Jolie underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013. In 2015, she removed her ovaries and fallopian tubes.