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It’s Christmastime in Beverly Hills in 1987, and a 12-year-old girl poses with the single mother who is raising her. As an elaborately decorated tree twinkles behind the pair, they hug, faces touching, for a warm family moment.
The photo captures Angelina Jolie in a moment from her past, far away from the exclusive celebrity world she now inhabits. But it’s a symbol of something still very important to the actress: Her relationship with her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died six years ago but still inspires the screen star today.
Bertrand was incredibly close to her two children, Angelina and James, bringing them up in relatively modest trappings in the most opulent neighborhood in Los Angeles, but surrounding them with love.
“Her name was Marcheline, but everybody called her Marshmallow, because she was just the softest, most gentle woman in the world,” Angelina Jolie has said of her late mother, whose early death from ovarian cancer sparked Jolie’s stunning decision to have a preventive double mastectomy, a procedure she completed in late April.
Described by some as more of a friend to her children than an authority figure, Bertrand was the polar opposite of their volatile (and absentee) father Jon Voight, with whom Jolie has had a famously troubled relationship as an adult.
The actress, director and UN special envoy, one of the most famous women in the world, has often cited her beloved mother’s death as her big vulnerability. “That’s my soft spot,” she told “60 Minutes” in 2011, tearing up. “I will never be as good a mother as she was. I will try my best, but I don’t think I could ever be. She was . . . she was just grace incarnate. She’s better than me.”
Bertrand, who grew up in Chicago with a French-Canadian father and American mother, was an aspiring actress living in LA when she met and married Voight in 1971. She had two kids: James Haven, 40, an actor and producer, and Angelina Jolie, 37, before separating with Voight in 1976. A Lee Strasberg-trained thespian who boasted the same enviably high cheekbones and plump lips as her daughter, Bertrand eventually gave up acting — she had bit parts in two movies in the early 1980s, as well as a 1971 appearance on the show “Ironside” — to become a full-time mother.
In a 2007 interview, Jolie’s older brother Haven described the domesticity Bertrand cultivated, saying, “There was very much that home feeling when we came back from school. Angie and I would walk in and comment on how we could smell things cooking and baking in the kitchen.”
He also stressed his mother’s emphasis on education, saying that Bertrand insisted on the kids doing their homework and doing it well. “She would do outlines to help us. When we were younger, she used flashcards. Or she’d be in the middle of cooking and pick up a carrot and teach us about the vegetable or the fruit so that it was visual as well. Angie is now the same with her kids.”
But Bertrand’s relationship with her daughter didn’t start out promisingly, at least according to the unauthorized biography of Jolie by Andrew Morton in 2010. After Voight had an affair with another actress and left his wife and their young children, Morton wrote, Bertrand moved her 1-year-old daughter into a separate apartment in the care of nannies because she so closely resembled her father at the time, and didn’t have much of a relationship with her until she was 3.
Still, Jolie — who has not spoken about Morton’s claims — has had nothing but good things to say of her mother and of their unconventional, laissez-faire relationship, which included Bertrand allowing an already adventurous 14-year-old Jolie to have her first boyfriend move in and live in her bedroom with her.
Although their mother tried to create a peaceful environment for her kids to grow up in, Haven said she was stressed out by her struggles with Voight, who often withheld child support.
Haven attributed Jolie’s rebellious spirit to seeing her mother forced to depend on a resentful ex-spouse for money: “Angie has been driven to be an independently wealthy woman now, because we saw what it was like to be at the mercy of someone who controls the money and pulls the strings,” he told the Daily Mail.
But the biggest inspiration Jolie took from her mom, to hear her repeatedly tell it, is in her determination to be a good mother to her own kids.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, she cited her mother’s sacrifices, referring to her own high-flying career as “easier,” in many ways, than full-time motherhood. “She didn’t have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences. Everything was for her children,” she said of Bertrand.
Describing her decision to have the preventive surgery, Jolie cited her desire to be around for her own kids for as long as possible.
She also desperately wanted her mother to know her grandchildren, even when she was struggling with illness. Bertrand, who was diagnosed more than seven years before her death, met three of Jolie and Brad Pitt’s six children. A photo in 2002 shows Jolie with a 4-month-old Maddox strapped to her breast, alongside her mother, heading to a hospital appointment at the UCLA Medical Center. Later, they drove to Westwood for ice cream. In 2006, when Bertrand was hospitalized, Jolie brought newborn daughter Shiloh to her Beverly Hills bedside, so the two could meet.
When Bertrand died at age 56 in January 2007, Jolie was devastated; many reports at the time remarked on her striking weight loss and pale appearance.
When she gave birth to twins the following year, she and Pitt opted to do it in the South of France, which Jolie said was intended to honor her mother.
“When I was deciding where to have the children, it was just a very comforting idea to do it in France, because I knew she would have loved it,” she told Britain’s Hello magazine. “That’s a reason why we’re all learning French, too, because she always wanted my children to speak the language.” Jolie also named one of the twins Vivienne Marcheline.
Jolie has said her performance as a mother desperate to find her son in the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie “Changeling” made her think of Bertrand. “When it came to her kids, she was really, really fierce,” she said at the time. “So this is very much her, and her story, and she was the woman I related to — who had the elegance and strength, knowing what was right.”
Jolie went on to say that she was happy, at least, that Bertrand was able to have a relationship with some of her kids.
“She lived long enough to meet most of my children. So, you can only think of that and you can only focus on just how grateful you are. We’re having such a wonderful time raising our children together. There’s a lot of love in our home. So, I remind myself of that whenever I think of what I’ve lost.”
But she was also clearly impacted by watching a loved one deal with a lingering death from cancer. “I also think that when you love somebody that much, you’re happy when they’re out of pain. Period. As much as you miss them, the important thing is that they don’t suffer,” she has said.
On the first anniversary of her mother’s death, Jolie and her brother James paid a visit to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA, where Bertrand died, to make a donation to the women’s cancer research fund — which may have contributed to her thinking about her own perilous health future.
She referred to it in a 2010 interview with Esquire, in which she mentioned that “There is no longevity on my mother’s side of the family. My grandmother also died young, so my mother always thought it could happen to her.”
But, Jolie added, “She lived to see her grandchildren, lived to see both me and my brother in a nice place. She was a real mother that way. She waited till everyone was OK. Then she closed her eyes.”
sstewart@nypost.com