Angelina Jolie is remembering her late mother, Marcheline Bertrand.
The Oscar winner, 50, got emotional talking about her mom’s 2007 cancer death at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday.
During a Q&A for Jolie’s new movie, “Couture,” an audience member who recently lost a friend to cancer asked the actress and her co-stars what their message of “hope” is for those struggling with grief.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Jolie responded while she got choked up, as seen in a TikTok video from the event.
After getting her composure, Jolie continued, “I think I will say that one thing I remember my mother saying when she had cancer, she said to me once, we had had a dinner and people were asking her how she was feeling and she said, ‘All anybody ever asks me about is cancer.’”
“So I would say, if you know someone who is going through something, ask them about everything else in their life as well, you know?” Jolie told the fan. “They’re a whole person and they’re still living.”
Bertrand was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1999. She was later diagnosed with breast cancer before she died in January 2007 at age 56.
Six years after her mom’s death, Jolie underwent a double mastectomy after learning she inherited a “faulty gene,” BRCA1, which put her at a greatly higher risk of cancer.
“I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could,” Jolie wrote in a May 2013 op-ed for the New York Times titled “My Medical Choice.”
In a different essay for the New York Times published in 2020, the “Maleficent” star — whose father is actor Jon Voight, 86 — compared losing her mom to someone “rip[ping] away a protective blanket.”
“When I look back to that time, I can see how much her death changed me,” she wrote at the time. “It was not sudden, but so much shifted inside.”
Bertrand and Voight got married in 1971 and separated in 1976 because of Voight’s infidelity. The exes also shared son James Haven, 52.
During the “Couture” Q&A, writer and director Alice Winocour stated that Jolie “immediately found a personal connection with the film for reasons we know since her mother and grandmother died of breast cancer.”
“She also had a connection in her flesh to this story since she underwent a double mastectomy to escape her family fate,” Winocour, 49, added, per People.
In “Couture,” Jolie plays an American film director named Maxine Walker who goes to Paris for Fashion Week. Maxine is in the midst of a divorce and is raising a teenage daughter when she is given a serious medical diagnosis, according to TIFF’s description of the film.
