The actress and director underwent the preventative procedure in 2013.

Angelina Jolie opens up about her love for her scars after double mastectomy

The actress and director underwent the preventative procedure in 2013.

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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February 11, 2026 1:13 a.m. ET

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Angelina Jolie in 2025. Credit:

Michael Loccisano/Getty

Angelina Jolie is grateful for the scars left behind by her double mastectomy.

"I've always been someone more interested in the scars and the life that people carry," the *Mr. and Mrs. Smith* star told France Inter in a video the public radio station posted Tuesday.

"I'm not drawn to some perfect idea of a life that has no scars. 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."

The Oscar winner noted that her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, had died too soon — she was 56 when she died in 2007 — after struggling with ovarian and breast cancer.

Jolie underwent a double mastectomy as a preventative measure, after learning that she had the BRCA1 gene mutation that predisposed her to breast cancer.**

"I lost my mom when I was young," she said, "and I'm raising my children without a grandmother."

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.**

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"So I think this is life," she said. "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, I think.”

Jolie explained her decision to have her operation in a *New York Times* column titled "My Medical Choice" in 2013.

"I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made," Jolie wrote. "My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer."

Maddox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Zahara, Shiloh, and Knox Jolie-Pitt in 2021.

Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic

The actress, producer, and director said she was speaking out on the topic "because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk, they, too, will know that they have strong options."**

In her latest movie, *Couture*, Jolie plays a film director who's diagnosed with the disease.

***Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.***

"Of course, it’s going to bring up many personal things," she told *Variety* in September. "But I have always found the heaviest films tend to have the most loving sets. There’s something quite comforting about having real conversations and having real feelings with a shared community. It was quite healing in many ways."**

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