Angelina Jolie Honors Late Mom Marcheline Bertrand With Heartfelt Essay

Nov 17, 2020

The late Marcheline Bertrand, the mother to one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, Angelina Jolie, lost a nearly eight-year battle to ovarian and breast cancer back in 2007. Like Jolie, Bertrand mostly led a private life. The two were very similar, and not just in looks.

Mother-daughter relationships are probably one of the most tumultuous yet most loving bonds that two humans can ever share. Marcheline and Angelina were no exception to this. In fact, some might say that their relationship was quite extreme.

Marcheline’s divorce from Jolie’s father Jon Voight took a heavy toll on her. When Jolie was just a one-year-old baby, Marcheline banished her to a different apartment all because the baby had resembled her ex-husband, according to Andrew Morton's Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (which is quite ironic, seeing how many have noted that Jolie looks way more alike to Marcheline, especially in her younger days.; check out this video showcasing Marcheline’s work reel). And this was but one instance of their strained relationship. As Jolie grew older, she and Marcheline slowly patched things up, and even developed a bond that was so strong, it has inspired many.

For Mother’s Day this year, Angelina Jolie penned a heartfelt entry dedicated to Marcheline. In the opinion piece, which was published in The New York Times on May 9th, Jolie speaks about the pain of losing Marcheline, how she has changed from the loss, and how meeting women all over the world has taught her what it means to be a mother.

“I lost my mother in my thirties,” Jolie lamented. “When I look back to that time, I can see how much her death changed me. 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.” Jolie goes on to talk about the commemorative tattoo she got to remember Marcheline: The letter “w” on her right hand.

“I got a small tattoo on my right hand after my mother died, knowing that hand tattoos fade. It looks to others like a letter “m.” But it wasn’t an “m” for Marcheline, her name. It was a “w” for "Winter”—the Rolling Stones song she sang to me as a baby, and that I remember loving as a little girl. “It's sure been a cold, cold winter,” she would sing to me. And at the line, “I wanna wrap my coat around you,” she would wrap me up in my blankets and snuggle me.”

Jolie says that when Voight cheated on her mother, it hurt the hopes she had for how she wanted her family life to be. She wanted to be an actress, but being 26 years old and raising Jolie and her brother James Haven with a famous ex tore it all away from her. Before she became a “full-time mother,” as Jolie called her, Marcheline was also an actress. According to Jolie, her mother was raised Catholic on the South Side of Chicago. Marcheline’s parents moved to Los Angeles in 1965 where they ran a bowling alley.

Besides the good looks, Jolie inherited her mother’s heart for human rights and activism. According to the Daily Mail, Marcheline founded Give Love Give Life, a charity set up to spread awareness for ovarian cancer. She died in January 2007 aged 56 after an eight-year battle with the exact condition. “Before her death, she told me that dreams can simply change shape,” Jolie, who is a mother of six, continued. Her dream to be an artist was in fact her mother’s dream. And later she hoped it would be mine.”

In 2020, Forbes reported that the 45-year-old is the second-highest-paid actress in the world, raking in $35.5 million. Jolie now has three daughters of her own, Zahara, 15, Shiloh, 14, and Vivienne, 12. Jolie finds similarities between her girls and their grandmother, saying: “... with my girls growing up and being the ages I remember so well as a daughter, I am rediscovering my mother and her spirit. She was a girl who danced all night on the Sunset Strip and loved rock 'n' roll. She was a woman who loved, even after loss, and never lost her grace and her smile.”

“I will never be as good a mother as she was,” Jolie says. I will try my best, but I don't think I ever will be. She was the most generous, loving woman. She's better than me.”

Did this inspire you? Let us know in the comments and be sure to pass this along to all the Angelina Jolie fans in your life! Don't forget to tell your mom how much you appreciate her whenever you can.