Angelina Jolie’s latest film, Couture, is being released this week in the US. Angelina has given several new interviews to promote it, which surprised me. I think she really believes in the film though, and she genuinely wants to support it. Angelina chatted with Yahoo about playing a character diagnosed with breast cancer, but she also talked about her children and what the past decade of her life has taught her. Some highlights:

Whether she’s wrestling with different questions now that she’s in her 50s: “Oh, completely. Completely and maybe I’ve come around to being a little bit more the person I used to be. I’m discovering something now that my daughters are older. They’re talking to me as young women, and I’m seeing what I want for them. 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.”

Her old self: “I think in some way they’re bringing me back to my old self,” Jolie says of her girls. “My desire for them to have all of the strength and openness and softness and faith and ferocity is reminding me. 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.”

The realism of the ‘Couture’ script: “I think the shock, the push to move — there was something about it that just felt so realistic, even in reading it… The way you almost debate the doctor, the way you keep thinking, I need to do this, these other things. You haven’t quite switched your realities. You haven’t quite accepted the gravity of what it is. You are both afraid and overwhelmed and don’t know how to tell people you love.”

Her on-screen romance with French actor Louis Garrel. “So often we see, when there’s a project that’s dealing with a woman’s cancer, it’s not often where her sexuality post-diagnosis is celebrated… This was a part of continuing to live all aspects, to live to your last breath, right? And not to start living only as a patient.”

She hasn’t dated anyone in a decade: “To be candid, I haven’t dated since I divorced a decade ago. So 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.” Playing Maxine, who has one daughter, reminded Jolie that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. “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.”

Reexamining priorities: “So yes, things are changing, but in a way I didn’t expect. It doesn’t feel like I’m 51 and starting to think of being older. I’m thinking I have to live again. Be free again. In a way that maybe life has broken me a little bit.”

[From Yahoo]

I believe her that she hasn’t “dated” anyone in ten years. I think there have been a few men in her life in the past decade, but they weren’t boyfriends or serious relationships or anything. Going over to Jonny Lee Miller’s apartment with a bottle of wine isn’t a date! Neither is going out to dinner with JLM in Beverly Hills! *sob* I really wanted them to get back together. Anyway, it sounds like we’re going to see a different version of Angelina now that she’s an empty-nester. She’ll be free to travel more, she’s selling her LA home, she might get back into the dating pool. I’ve got to believe that men will still line up to date her.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.