Angelina Jolie has signalled a full return to acting after several years largely out of the spotlight, drawing on some of the most painful chapters of her own life for a role in her new film Couture, which she says has proved to be one of the most personal of her career.
The Oscar winner, who once carried multiple blockbusters a year, has released only one previous film in the past five years, 2024’s Maria, in which she played the opera singer Maria Callas. In Couture, directed by Alice Winocour, Jolie plays Maxine Walker, an American filmmaker who receives a breast cancer diagnosis while working during Paris Fashion Week. The film, which explores the intertwined lives of three women working around the shows, opened in France in February and was released in US cinemas on 26 June.
The role carries deep personal resonance for Jolie. Her mother, the actress Marcheline Bertrand, died of breast cancer at the age of 56, and Jolie underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013 after learning she carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene that gave her an estimated 87 per cent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 per cent risk of ovarian cancer. “I thought often of my mother and how much I think this film would have been wonderful for her when she was going through this,” Jolie has said of taking on the part.
Filming a scene in which an oncologist marks operation lines on her character’s chest brought Jolie back to her own surgery. “It felt a strange moment to have Hollywood in my hospital room,” she told Reuters. “Here I am, you know, in my gown, getting my needles, doing all the stuff that I do, but now we are sharing it. And so, it felt very vulnerable.” She said she hoped the film would leave audiences with a sense of shared humanity: “We’re connected as human beings, and we all go through something… And it’s very necessary to pull us all through being human.”
Jolie has also used the film’s press tour to reflect on a broader shift in her life and career since her divorce from Brad Pitt in 2016. She told Variety that she had largely stepped back from acting even before the split, intending to focus on directing, but found herself drawn back to performing out of necessity. “I had kind of quit acting before my divorce. I was focusing on directing, and I thought I’d be doing my international work,” she said. “But then suddenly the only way to be home more… or to make a good amount of money, was to go back to acting. I was only taking things that were short or close by or I could take [my children].”
Jolie and Pitt share six children: Maddox, 24, Pax, 22, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and twins Knox and Vivienne, who turn 18 this month. Several of the children have in recent years dropped the Pitt surname, a development that has been reported amid claims of “parental alienation” on Jolie’s part — allegations that have circulated in press reports but have not been independently verified. Jolie has instead credited her children with helping restore what she calls her “fighting spirit.” “I lost it for a bit. I got kind of taken down a little bit and it’s coming back in large part thanks to my children, who are now older, and encouraging it,” she said, adding that they now want to see her “out travelling the world” and doing things for herself. “They know me more than anybody, and they still like me, which says a lot.”
Away from her acting career, Jolie remains locked in a long-running legal dispute with Pitt over Château Miraval, the French winery the couple bought together in 2008 and where they married in 2014. Pitt has argued that Jolie’s 2021 sale of her stake to Tenute del Mondo, part of the Stoli Group run by businessman Yuri Shefler, breached an agreement that neither would sell without the other’s consent. A California court ruled on 17 June to compel depositions from Stoli Group executives, with a further hearing set for 8 July on whether Shefler himself must also be deposed; a trial remains scheduled for February 2027, though Jolie’s legal team has sought to postpone it. Her lawyers have dismissed the significance of Pitt’s recent procedural wins, saying they “have made no impact on the merits of the case, and certainly has no impact on Ms. Jolie’s case,” and that she is “looking forward to defeating the case at trial next year so that their family can finally focus their energies on healing and moving on.”
On a more personal note, Jolie has also hinted she may be ready to date again, more than a decade after her marriage ended. “To be candid, I haven’t dated since I divorced a decade ago,” she told Yahoo Entertainment. “So I kind of get in my head that that aspect of me is not centred in my life if I’m focusing on my children, my family.” Playing a character in Couture who is both a devoted mother and open to new romance, she said, helped shift her thinking. “It took me a second to kind of say, well, she can also love her daughter and be dedicated to her daughter and also need this as a woman and receive this as a woman.”
