Years After Breast Cancer Surgeries, Angelina Jolie Opens Up On Her 'Scars'

Angelina Jolie is once again speaking honestly about her health journey and the choices she made over the years. In a recent interview with French media outlet French Inter, the 50-year-old actor shared how she feels about the scars from her preventive double mastectomy in 2013. For her, they are not marks to hide. They are reminders of strength and intention.

What Angelina Jolie Said 

"Well, I've always been someone more interested in the scars and the life that people carry," Angelina said during the conversation. She explained that she has never believed in the idea of a flawless life. To her, scars are proof of living fully and making tough decisions when needed.

"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," she added.

Angelina Jolie's decision to undergo surgery was shaped by personal loss. Her mother, actor Marcheline Bertrand, died in 2007 at the age of 56 after battling cancer. That experience stayed with her. It also influenced how she approached her own health as a mother of six.

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

The star first shared details about her surgery in a 2013 New York Times op-ed titled My Medical Choice. At the time, she revealed that doctors had found she carried a “faulty gene,” BRCA1, which sharply increased her risk of developing breast cancer.

"I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy," she wrote then. "But it is one I am very happy that I made."

She also shared how much the procedure reduced her risk. "My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent," she wrote. "I can tell my children that they don't need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer."

In 2015, she took another preventive step and had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to lower her risk of ovarian cancer.

Looking back now, Angelina Jolie sees her scars as part of her story. "So for me, no, I think this is life. And if you get to the end of your life and you haven't made [a big, you know], 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 concluded.

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