Angelina Jolie's Aunt Dies of Breast Cancer

Angelina Jolie's aunt has died of breast cancer, barely three weeks after the Hollywood actress had a double mastectomy to avoid the disease.

Debbie Martin died in a hospital in a San Diego at the age of 61, her husband Ron Martin confirmed.

Mrs Martin was the younger sister of Jolie's mother, Marcheline Bertrand, whose own death from cancer in 2007 inspired the surgery that Angelina Jolie described in a May 14 article in The New York Times.

According to her husband, Mrs Martin had the same defective BRCA1 gene that Jolie does, but did not know it until after her 2004 cancer diagnosis.

He said that had his wife known in advance of her genetic risk "she would have done exactly what Angelina did".

In her article earlier this month, Jolie wrote: "My doctors estimated that I had an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 50% risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

"Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65% risk of getting it, on average.

"Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimise the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy."

See a video of her Aunt's husband speaking on his wife's death: