Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrive at the 15th Annual AFI Awards at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills on January 9, 2015 in Beverly Hills, California. (Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic)
Angelina Jolie has opened up about battling through early onset menopause at the age of 40 as a result of her ovary removal surgery earlier this year.
The Maleficent star had a double mastectomy in 2013, when she discovered she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation, which placed her at a higher risk of developing breast cancer.
She took further preventative measures in March to remove her ovaries and Fallopian tubes after her doctor detected what could be early signs of ovarian cancer, the same disease her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, had battled for eight years before her death in 2007.
She underwent hormonal replacement therapy in the months following the operation, and later revealed she was going through early onset menopause at the age of 40.
Now she has detailed the effects of her health battle, telling U.S. broadcaster Tom Brokaw, “Every woman is different when they go through menopause and… I didn’t know emotionally how it would feel. I knew the breasts would be a bigger surgery and physically changing. The ovaries is more your hormones changing and your emotions changing, but it’s different; you feel different.”
Angelina has credited her husband, Brad Pitt, with supporting and comforting her throughout the ordeal and making it clear the surgeries wouldn’t take anything away from the woman he fell in love with.
“I think for as much as it speaks about my strength, he made it very, very clear to me that what he loved, and what was a woman to him, was somebody who was smart, and capable and cared about her family,” she reveals.
“It’s not about the physical body, so I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and this wasn’t something where I was going to feel less of a woman because my husband wasn’t gonna let that happen.”
“I just remember, there was no vanity to my wife’s approach (to handling the health crisis),” Brad recalls. “It was mature. ‘This is our life and we’re gonna make the best of it.’ There was a strength in that. It was just another one of those things in life that makes you tighter, and she was doing it for the kids, and she was doing it for her family so… we could be together, which trumped everything and anything.”
The couple, which wed last year, has six children together.