Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie Talk Family, Fame and Working Together

Brad Pitt praises his wife Angelina Jolie's courage in a new joint interview.The husband and wife appeared on the Today Show on Monday, where they discussed the actress' decision to undergo preventative double mastectomy in 2013, and the surgery to remove her ovaries earlier this year.

 'There was no vanity to my wife's approach,' the 51-year-old said. 'It was mature.' 

He said that her approach to the situation was to make the best of it, explaining: 'There was 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.'

Angelina had the double mastectomy at the age of 37, after learning that she had an 87% risk of developing breast cancer due to a defective BRCA1 gene.

Due to the same anomaly, she had a 50% risk of developing ovarian cancer and decided to get the oophorectomy two years later, which brought upon early menopause.

Angelina, 40, went on to discuss how her mother had a secret pact with her surgeon. 'We had some of the same nurses, some of the same doctors,' the star told Tom Brokaw. 

'So, the doctor that did my ovary surgery was my mother's doctor. And apparently my mother had said to her, "Promise me you will take Angie's ovaries out." So when we kind of got together, we both had a big cry, and she said, "I promised your mother, and I gotta do this."'

Angelina's mother, who was also an actress, Marcheline Bertrand, died at age 56 in 2007 after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1999.The actress turned writer-director also discussed in the same interview how her new film By The Sea, which co-stars Brad, was inspired by her grief over losing her mother. 

'We can't say what the whole film is about, but a lot of the film was when I went to visit my mom in the hospital, when she found out she had cancer the first time, she was gonna have her ovaries removed, (and) she was very upset, feeling like...they're taking out her parts that were female, and there was a woman down the hall who was wailing. I later found out it was a young woman who had not had children yet, and that put everything into perspective.'

'Every woman is different when they go through menopause, and...I didn't know emotionally how I would feel,' the star admitted. 'I knew the breast 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.'

The experience, meanwhile, only strengthened her marriage to Brad. 'She was doing it for the kids,' the actor said proudly of his wife, 'and she was doing it for her family so we could be together.''I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and that this wasn't something where I was gonna feel less of a woman because my husband wasn't gonna let that happen,' the Salt star explained.

'To face these issues together and speak about them and talk about what it is to be human, I think can be a beautiful thing.'

By The Sea will mark the first film the two have collaborated on since Mr. And Mrs, Smith (2005), where the duo fell in love. 

Angelina said of their new film: 'We were joking... We were saying, like..."See, this is the beginning. And then this is ten years later. This is what 10 years of marriage will do to you."'The couple, who have six children, married in August 2014 after nine years together, and spent their honeymoon filming new drama By The Sea on the Maltese island of Gozo.

However she is quick to point out that the story – about a couple whose marriage is on the brink of collapse – is not based on their own relationship.

‘I'm counting on the audience to know that if it was close to us at all, we could never make this film,’ Angelina explained. ‘It's because we're actually very, very stable and these aren't our issues.’

A new trailer for the 1970s set drama was released on Friday, but doesn’t give too much away.With no dialogue, the clip still shows plenty of tense moments between the volatile characters, with Roland (Brad) getting aggressive and Vanessa (Angelina) popping pills.

By The Sea will be released in the US on November 13 and the UK on December 11.

source:dailymail