Angelina Jolie has broken down in front of crowds at the Toronto International Film Festival while remembering her late mother after her cancer battle.
During a September 7 audience Q&A session at the premiere of Jolie‘s new film Couture – in which she portrays a female film director who tries to balance her motherhood, sexuality and craft after finding out she has cancer – a crowd member revealed that he recently lost a friend to cancer and asked the actress for advice.
Jolie, 50, paused to gather her emotions with her hand over her mouth before telling the fan, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
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She began dabbing at her eyes as she 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 what she was doing, and she said, ‘All anybody ever asks me about is cancer.’
“So I would say, if you know someone who’s going through something, ask them about everything else in their life as well. They’re a whole person, and they’re still living,” she said, per a video shared by Entertainment Weekly.
Jolie lost her mother to ovarian cancer in 2007, and soon after found out she had an 87 per cent risk of developing breast cancer due to a defective BRCA1 gene from her maternal line.
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She revealed in a series of op-eds for The New York Times that she underwent a preventative double mastectomy on February 16, 2013, at age 37.
The act caused major media attention, though Jolie made sure to emphasise in her writing, “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.
“My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 per cent to under 5 per cent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”
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