Angelina Jolie is a mother of six children, but at one point in time she thought she’d never, ever become a mother. “It’s strange, I never wanted to have a baby. I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babysat. I never thought of myself as a mother,” the 40-year-old actress told the Associated Press during an interview in Cambodia on Wednesday.
The Oscar winner has been in the country to direct her next film, First They Killed My Father, which is based on a Khmer Rouge memoir written by survivor Loung Ung that recounts the 1970s Cambodian genocide.
The first thought having a life with children struck her when she was shooting Tomb Raider in the year 2000. She was playing with children at a Cambodian school when it became “suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere.”
She adopted Maddox in 2002, and a year later opened a foundation in his name in northwestern Battambang province. Maddox is now 14 and sporting what his mom calls “a blonde stripe”.
He joined her in Cambodia to help behind the scenes for the project that she sees as a unique merger of her film work and family with humanitarian interests.
“For me, this is the moment, where finally my life is kind of in line, and I feel I’m finally where I should be,” Jolie said.
