‘Not afraid’: The tough cancer conversation Angelina Jolie had to have with her daughters

Angelina Jolie has detailed how her new film Couture helped her have important conversations with her daughters about their family’s history with breast cancer.

More than a decade after the actress, now 51, underwent a preventative double mastectomy, she is playing an American filmmaker at Paris Fashion Week whose life is upended by a breast cancer diagnosis.

Jolie has never shied away from sharing her experience with her double mastectomy in 2013, after doctors found she was a carrier of the BRCA1 gene that increased her risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

“The film itself is going to help me talk to my daughters about it,” she told Hello at the New York screening of Couture.

Jolie has three daughters with ex Brad Pitt, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 19, and Vivienne, 17.

“I’ve spoken to them, of course, a bit about it, but even telling them that it’s coming out, and they were talking to me about what it’s about.” 

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The Oscar winner revealed that while filming Couture she wore her mother Marcheline Betrand’s ashes around her neck. Bertrand passed in 2007 aged 56 after an eight-year battle with ovarian and breast cancer.

Jolie continued: “It got us [her and her daughters] into the conversation about the gene and maybe if they have it and how medicine’s changing, or how we live or all the many things that could happen and not to be afraid.”

“All of us go through something in life. All of us are being challenged in one way or another and all of us have choices to make about how we approach that, and how we have to learn to lean on each other and know that we’re not the only ones going through something.”

In February, the Hollywood star, who is also mum to Maddox, 24, Pax, 22, and Knox, 17, described her mastectomy scars as a reminder of the “choice I made to do what I could do to stay here as long as I could with my children.”

“I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to have the choice to do something proactive about my health,” she told French radio station France Inter.

Jolie first bared her double mastectomy scars in December 2025, telling Time France after her photo shoot, “I share these scars with many women I love.”

“I’m always moved when I see other women share theirs,” she continued. “I wanted to join them.”