Angelina Jolie inspires women by celebrating her mastectomy scars
Angelina Jolie opened up about the meaning behind her scars, describing them as symbols of strength and choice.
In a recent interview with France Inter, the Oscar winning actress and director said she has learned to embrace the marks left by her 2013 preventative double mastectomy.
“I’ve always been someone more interested in the scars and the life that people carry,” Jolie explained.
“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, and I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to have the choice to do something proactive about my health.”
Her decision was shaped by her family history.
Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died at 56 after battling ovarian and breast cancer.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith star later discovered she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation, which significantly increased her risk of developing breast cancer.
Writing in her 2013 New York Times column My Medical Choice, she revealed that the surgery reduced her risk from 87 percent to under 5 percent.
“I lost my mom when I was young,” she said. “And I’m raising my children without a grandmother. So I think this is life. And if 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.”
For the unversed, Jolie shares six children with ex-husband Brad Pitt: Maddox (24), Pax (22), Zahara (21), Shiloh (19) and 17-year-old fraternal twins Knox and Vivienne.
