Chris Anne Affleck, the mother of Oscar winners Ben and Casey Affleck, died June 2, her family announced. She was 83 and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December.
Christine Anne Boldt was born in New York City in December 1942. She was a graduate of Harvard University and spent 35 years as a public school teacher. She retired in 2008 and was a fierce civil rights advocate throughout her life, having been one of the original freedom riders who went into the Deep South during the 1960s.
Chris and her ex-husband Timothy Affleck welcomed their first child Ben, the two-time Oscar winner, in 1972. Ben’s brother, Casey Affleck, also an Oscar winner, was born in 1975, around the time their family relocated to Massachusetts, where she continued her teaching career.
“My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master’s there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school,” Ben told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012. “My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn’t go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.”
By the time Ben was 12, his parents divorced. As his passion for entertainment grew during his adolescence, Chris played a hand in his early industry beginnings, connecting her son with her former Harvard roommate, casting director Patty Collins, who helped him audition for commercials and TV movies.
She was an avid supporter of his career and attended the 1998 Oscars alongside him and Matt Damon, who also brought his mother as his date. That was the year they won their first Academy Awards.
“We were sitting next to our moms and we won, and we kind of hugged our moms. I remember how everyone had made such a big thing out of it as if this was such a novelty,” Ben told Vanity Fair of the moment. “I remember thinking, being insecure, like, ‘Why? Why is it weird that we’re bringing our moms?’ Who else do you think we would bring?”
Chris was given six months to live in December, and her greatest wish after her diagnosis was being to see her grandson graduate high school, her family said. She attended the event with her family on May 31 and died peacefully in her sleep two days later.
In addition to her sons, survivors include her five grandchildren, Indiana, Violet, Atticus, Fin and Sam.
