Article updated: 5/14/2013 8:07 AM

Angelina Jolie says she had double mastectomy

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Actress Angelina Jolie authored an op-ed for Tuesday's New York Times where she writes that in April she finished three months of surgical procedures to remove both breasts as a preventive measure. She says she's kept the process private but is writing about it now with hopes she can help other women.

Associated Press/March 2012

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Angelina Jolie says that she has had a preventive double mastectomy after learning she carried a gene that made it extremely likely she would get breast cancer. "My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56," Jolie writes in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. "She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was."

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