After a Decade, Angelina Jolie Rethinks What It Means to Be More Than Mom

Ten years without dating. A decade spent pouring everything into motherhood, her work, her family—the parts of life that felt urgent and non-negotiable. But sitting down to talk about her new drama Couture, Angelina Jolie, now 51, found herself confronting something she’d quietly shelved: the woman underneath the“Mom”label.

The film’s premise—a character navigating unexpected romance while facing a breast cancer diagnosis during Paris Fashion Week—hit closer than expected. As Jolie explained to Yahoo Entertainment on June 22, the role forced her to reckon with an assumption she’d been living under.“To be candid, I haven’t dated since I divorced a decade ago,”she said, before adding the real insight:“I kind of get in my head that that aspect of me is not centered in my life if I’m focusing on my children, my family.”

But here’s where the story gets interesting. Playing Maxine, a single mother who discovers that love and devotion to her daughter aren’t mutually exclusive, shifted something in Jolie’s 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,”she reflected. It’s a small realization on the surface—a character lesson—but it points to something larger: the compartmentalization women often practice, the belief that choosing one identity means sacrificing another.

Her marriage to Brad Pitt lasted from 2014 to 2016, though the divorce wasn’t finalized until 2024. The pair share six children: Maddox, 24, Pax, 22, Zahara, 21, Shiloh, 20, and 17-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne. Yet what’s most revealing in this interview isn’t the relationship timeline—it’s what’s happening now as her daughters grow older.“They’re talking to me as young women, and I’m seeing what I want for them,”Jolie said.“I’m seeing what I don’t want them to lose and what I want them to hold on to. And it’s kind of reminding me what I may have lost.”

The actress describes feeling less like a relic entering her final act and more like someone given a second chance.“I think in some way they’re bringing me back to my old self,”she continued.“I think they kind of want me now to not just be‘Mom.’There’s a different room for me to be that woman again, that’s not just a mom.”At 51, she’s not settling into what comes next—she’s reclaiming what came before, or perhaps discovering it for the first time.“I have to live again. Be free again. In a way that maybe life has broken me a little bit,”she said.

It’s a story about permission—the kind we often need to give ourselves. Not permission to abandon motherhood, but permission to exist alongside it. Her daughters, in their own journeys toward womanhood, are teaching her that strength, softness, ferocity, and openness aren’t things you trade away. They’re things you hold onto, even as the shape of your life changes.