'There was no vanity to my wife's approach,' the 51-year-old said. 'It was mature. There was a 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.'
'We had some of the same nurses, some of the same doctors,' she told interviewer, 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."
"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.'
'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.'
Angelina Jolie said her health experience strengthened their marriage.
'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. 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.'
