“How she must have felt on that night always really stuck with me,” said the actress, who became emotional while remembering her late mother, Marcheline Bertrand, as she accepted the Maltin Modern Master Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Angelina Jolie is getting candid about her family’s history with the Academy Awards.
During a conversation with critic Leonard Maltin at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Wednesday, per PEOPLE, the actress — who accepted the Maltin Modern Master Award — reflected on her career, and her experience with the Oscars.
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When Maltin asked Jolie, 49, about her Academy Award win in 2000 for her performance in Girl, Interrupted, she said, “I am trying to think of how much I’m going to share right now.”
Jolie — who is the daughter of Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand — recalled watching the 1979 Academy Awards, during which her father won the Oscar for Best Actor for Coming Home. The ceremony came just a few years after Voight and Bertrand’s separation in 1976, and Jolie shared that her mother watched her ex attend the awards show with “the other woman.”
“My mom was home with two little kids,” Jolie recalled of Bertrand, who also welcomed Jolie’s brother James Haven with Voight. “My mom’s dream was to be an actor. I believe my mother’s mother’s dream was to be an actor, which is probably why she took her to the theater in Chicago all the time.”
“She was in her twenties, because she had me when she was very young,” she continued. “She was divorced to a very famous man and she was home with her babies in an apartment watching him win an Oscar with the other woman.”
Angelina Jolie gets emotional remembering her mother while accepting the Maltin Modern Master Award at #SBIFF2025 pic.twitter.com/kGMbyE166M
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 6, 2025
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“It was kind of just a part of our family history,” Jolie added. “I remember thinking that [Bertrand] was there for me and my brother and that was the choice she made. And how she must have felt on that night always really stuck with me.”
Over two decades later, the Maria star said she was able to share a special moment with her mother when she won her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2000.
“To have that moment, to get off that stage and call her and say, ‘It’s yours’ — and I gave it to her — one of the best moments of my life,'” Jolie said.
On Wednesday, Jolie remembered Bertrand, who died in 2007, when she was honored with the Maltin Modern Master Award, which she accepted from Ava DuVernay at the film festival.
The mom of six began emotional while speaking about her late mother.
“Many people go through life without a creative outlet. I think of my mother she had to give up her dreams of a creative life, but she embraced that side of mine,” Jolie said. “My mother would write letters to my characters — ‘Dear Gia,’ ‘Dear Lisa Rowe,’ ‘Dear Lara Croft’ … I try to imagine sometimes now what she would write.”
