Angelina Jolie bravely shared her decision earlier this year to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed due to a susceptibility to cancer, and now she’s opening up about what her body is going through following the surgery.
The actress says she hasn’t had a bad reaction to it, but rather she feels comfortable with her body.
“I actually love being in menopause. I haven’t had a terrible reaction to it, so I’m very fortunate. I feel older, and I feel settled being older,” Jolie said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. “I feel happy that I’ve grown up. I don’t want to be young again.”
Jolie, who has lost several family members to cancer, wrote a piece for the New York Times earlier this year announcing her decision, which came after her controversial voluntary double mastectomy. For Angelina, sharing her stories with the world meant possibly helping many women.
“Two years ago I wrote about my choice to have a preventive double mastectomy. A simple blood test had revealed that I carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene. It gave me an estimated 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. I lost my mother, grandmother and aunt to cancer. I wanted other women at risk to know about the options,” Jolie wrote.
Angelina Jolie also spoke recently about shooting her newest film, By The Sea, which she also wrote and produced. During filming, Jolie says, she got a very serious phone call that changed the way she saw the project…including a topless scene.
“The film was written before I had the mastectomy. And then when I realized I was shooting the film, it did cross my mind to cut certain things. But I felt that was the wrong thing to do. That’s hiding something, and I just don’t believe in that. And then during the edit I got the call that I might have cancer and had to have my ovaries removed,” Jolie said.
Angelina says that through it all, she had a strong support system in husband Brad Pitt, who “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, that it’s not about your physical body. So I knew through the surgeries that this wasn’t going to be something that made me feel like less of a woman, because my husband wouldn’t let that happen.”