Angelina Jolie, in a piece for Tuesday's New York Times, says she had a preventive double mastectomy after medical tests indicated she had the "faulty" BRCA1 gene, which left her with an 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer - the same disease that killed her mother.

In the piece, titled "My Medical Choice," the 37-year-old Academy Award winner said she underwent three months of surgeries from early February and late April. The mother-of-six said her mother Marcheline Bertrand's premature death in January 2007 spurred her in the direction to make the bold decision.

"My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56," the actress wrote. "She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms.

"But