Angelina Jolie publicly revealed her mastectomy scars for the first time in December 2025, sharing the story behind her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy in 2013. The actress made this choice after discovering she carried the BRCA1 gene, which substantially elevates the risk of breast cancer. Jolie described her scars as meaningful symbols of a decision she made
“to do what I could do to stay here as long as I could with my children.”
This deeply personal revelation came more than a decade after the death of her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who passed away from ovarian cancer in 2007 at age 56. Jolie has been open about how her mother’s early death and genetic risk influenced her proactive steps toward protecting her health.
The Emotional Significance Behind Her Scars
In a recent interview with French Inter, Jolie expressed that she embraces her scars, viewing them not as flaws but as evidence of strength and survival. She explained,
“I’ve always been someone more interested in the scars and the life that people carry,”
emphasizing that she does not aspire to
“some perfect idea of a life that has no scars.”
Jolie continued,
“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,”
reflecting on her loss of her mother at a young age and raising her children “without a grandmother.”
She also philosophized on what scars represent in a full life:
“So for me, no, I think this is life. And if you get to the end of your life and you haven’t made, 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.”
Background: Jolie’s Medical Decisions and Advocacy
Jolie first disclosed her decision to undergo the double mastectomy in a 2013 New York Times op-ed titled My Medical Choice. In that piece, she revealed that testing showed she had the BRCA1 gene, which raised her breast cancer risk to 87 percent. After surgery, Jolie said, her risk dropped to under 5 percent.
“I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy,”
she wrote, “But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell
