How Angelina Jolie Told Her Daughters About Family's Cancer History

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s Daughter Zahara Files to Legally Remove Dad’s Last Name

Angelina Jolie isn’t shying away from the important discussions.

More than a decade after she underwent a preventative double mastectomy, The 51-year-old detailed how she’s used her new film Couture to spark a conversation about her family’s history with breast cancer with her daughters Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 19, and Vivienne, 17.

“The film itself is going to help me talk to my daughters about it,” she told Hello in a video shared on June 17. “I’ve spoken to them, of course, a bit about it, but even telling them that it’s coming out and they were talking to me about what it’s about.”

In Couture, Jolie plays a filmmaker diagnosed with cancer. And during filming, the Oscar winner, whose mom Marcheline Bertrand died in 2007 at 56 after an eight-year battle with ovarian and breast cancer, wore her mom’s ashes around her neck.

“It got us into the conversation about the gene and maybe if they have it and how medicine’s changing,” she continued, “or how we live or all the many things that could happen and not to be afraid.”

She added, “All of us go through something in life. All of us are being challenged in one way or another and all of us have choices to make about how we approach that.”

The Mr. & Mrs. Smith star—also mom to Maddox, 24, Pax, 22 and Vivienne’s twin brother Knox, 17, with ex Brad Pitt—is no stranger to sharing her experience with her double mastectomy, which she got after doctors found she was a carrier of the BRCA1 gene that increased her risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Vertical

In fact, she recently gave insight on how she views her scars from the procedure.

"I've always been someone more interested in the scars and the life that people carry," she said in a recent interview with French radio station France Inter. "I'm not drawn to some perfect idea of a life that has no scars."

And Jolie isn’t the only star who has been frank about their health battles. Read on to learn about more stars who’ve detailed the way cancer has touched their lives…

For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App