Like mother, like daughter.
Angelina Jolie admits that she initially pursued acting to fulfill her mother’s dream of becoming an actress.
“I did it in the beginning because it was my mother’s dream,” the “Maleficent” star said of her late mom, Marcheline Bertrand, in an interview for W Magazine’s Best Performances issue.
“She pursued acting, but by the time my mom was 25, she was divorced with two kids and she decided to focus her life solely on motherhood.”
Jolie, 49, clarified that Bertrand “didn’t make [her] feel like it was a sacrifice,” because she “loved being a stay-at-home mom.”
“But she really wanted me to be an actress,” Jolie recalled. “I don’t remember making the choice. I remember it made my mom happy. My mom was my manager, and we were a team.”
The Oscar winner admitted that she “always wanted” to buy a home for her mom and even “started to pay the bills” for Bertrand.
However, Bertrand sadly passed away in 2007 after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer and breast cancer. She was 56.
“When my mom passed, it was harder for me to be an actress because I realized how much of it was for her,” Jolie confessed.
The “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” star has since discussed her mother’s influence on her life, both personally and professionally, in a 2015 essay for the New York Times.
“After she died, I found a video of her acting in a short film,” Jolie wrote at the time. “She was good. It was all possible for her.”
The actress also wrote about her mother’s life and death in a second essay for the New York Times in 2020.
She compared losing her mother — who launched her own production company, Woods Road Production, in the early 2000s — 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 confessed. “It was not sudden, but so much shifted inside. Losing a mother’s love and warm, soft embrace is like having someone rip away a protective blanket.”
Bertrand shared Jolie and son James Haven with her husband, famed actor Jon Voight. The couple divorced shortly after Jolie’s birth due to Voight’s infidelity.
“When my father had an affair, it changed [my mom’s] life,” Jolie continued in her essay for the NYT. “It set her dream of family life ablaze. But she still loved being a mother.”
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