Angelina Jolie said on Tuesday she hoped her family would be stronger after her divorce from Brad Pitt, but that the actress still thinks of him as a wonderful father.
“We are focusing on the health of our family, and so we will be, we will be stronger when we come out of this because that’s what we’re determined to do as a family,” Jolie told ABC Television’s “Good Morning America” in an interview.
Jolie, in some of her first comments on the divorce from Pitt, was asked if she still thought of the actor as the “wonderful father” she had called him several years ago.
“Of course,” she replied. “We will always be a family, always.”
Jolie and Pitt’s surprise split last September after more than 10 years together turned bitter after fights over custody of their six children and accusations of child abuse against Pitt involving one of the children after the “Moneyball” star lost his temper.
Pitt has since been cleared of any wrongdoing but Jolie has primary custody of their children pending a final settlement of the divorce.
Jolie, in Cambodia to promote her new movie “First They Killed My Father,” told the BBC in an interview at the weekend that the split with Pitt has been difficult.
“Many people find themselves in this situation. My whole family have all been through a difficult time. My focus is my children, our children,” she said.
All six of the children flew to Cambodia for Saturday’s world premiere of “First They Killed My Father,” which is a real life account of the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s in which more than one million people died of starvation, exhaustion, disease or in mass executions.
Jolie, who adopted her eldest child Maddox, now 15, from Cambodia, directed the film and said she made it to better understand the recent history of Cambodia.
“Forty years ago this war affected every single individual here, and I wanted to understand myself. I don’t know much of my son’s (Maddox) birth parents, but I believe they would’ve gone through this war. I wanted to understand him and his culture in a deeper way, and I wanted to bring this story to this country in this country’s language,” she said.
