Angelina Jolie Pitt: 'I Actually Love Being in Menopause'

Angelina Jolie Pitt‘s early menopause – following a surgery to remove ovaries and fallopian tubes in March – hasn’t been a detriment, she told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Sunday.

“I actually love being in menopause,” Jolie Pitt, 40, said.

“I haven’t had a terrible reaction to it, so I’m very fortunate,” she said. “I feel older, and I feel settled being older.”

With age has come contentment, she told the Daily Telegraph: “I feel happy that I’ve grown up. I don’t want to be young again.”

The By the Sea writer/director/star told PEOPLE in its latest issue how her recent health choices affected shooting for her latest film, which also stars husband Brad Pitt.

“[The film] was written before I had the mastectomy. And then when I realized I was shooting the film, it did cross my mind to cut certain things,” she said, such as the film’s topless scene. “But I felt that was the wrong thing to do. That’s hiding something, and I just don’t believe in that. And then during the edit I got the call that I might have cancer and had to have my ovaries removed.”

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Jolie Pitt’s preventative surgeries were done after she learned she carried the BRCA1 gene, which increases her risk of cancer.

She lost both her grandmother Lois Bertrand and her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, to long battles with ovarian cancer.

“I wouldn’t want to be in my 20s or 30s again,” she told PEOPLE. “I’m someone who didn’t think I would live very long. I’ve been worried about death and cancer and life. I think I’ve lived very much for the day.

“Now I’ve settled into my life with my children and Brad.”

Her husband, 51, “made it very, very clear to me that what he loved and what was a woman to him was somebody who was smart, and capable, and cared about her family, that it’s not about your physical body,” she told the Daily Telegraph.

“So I knew through the surgeries that this wasn’t going to be something that made me feel like less of a woman, because my husband wouldn’t let that happen,” she said.

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Indeed, she told PEOPLE, with age comes more than just contentment.

It brings appreciation for a new kind of beauty.

“We both appreciate the beauty in looking at each other and thinking, ‘God, you’re just getting stranger as you’re getting older,’ ” Jolie Pitt said.

“Brad and I are fortunate because we see the beauty in each other’s changes,” she said. “I’m more interested in his 50-year-old self than his 40-year-old self. And then you look forward to even more years together.”