Angelina Jolie on Her Surgeries: ‘I Can’t Wait to Hit 50 and Know I Made It’

Given that opportunities for women in Hollywood can become few and far between as actresses age, it’s rare to hear from a celebrity who’s excited to grow older. But after what she’s gone through with her health, Angelina Jolie Pitt says she can’t wait for her next big birthday.

“Both of the women in my family, my mother and my grandmother started dying in their 40s,” Jolie Pitt, who covers Vogue‘s November issue, told the magazine. “I’m 40. I can’t wait to hit 50 and know I made it.”

In the past few years the actress has undergone two preventative surgeries—a double mastectomy and the removal of her fallopian tubes and ovaries—since learning she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation that put her at a high risk for certain cancers. Both Jolie Pitt’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, and her grandmother Lois Bertand died from ovarian cancer.

“I wish my mom had been able to make those choices,” she told Vogue.

She detailed the decision to have her most recent surgery in a New York Times op-ed earlier this year. “I know my children will never have to say, ‘Mom died of ovarian cancer,’ ” she wrote.

[Vogue]