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However rich you are, however secure and successful, the decision to have invasive surgery, cutting away your breasts and your ovaries must be an agonising one. The actor and UN ambassador Angelina Jolie has just announced that that’s what she’s done. Her body has been a large part of her commercial image and success as a film star; as the dynamic and powerful Lara Croft Tomb Raider and latterly as the central character in the film Maleficent, in which her brooding physical presence dominates the magical forest in which she lives. In her life away from film, she’s prioritised a high profile campaign with the MP William Hague tackling the use of rape as a weapon of war in places such as Syria, Rwanda, Congo and Colombia. On and off screen, she seems to be a woman who claims the agency that she has, not to be to the side but in the centre, of making change. The decisions she’s making about her health are intensely personal but she is making them public. In response, UK clinics reported a doubling of enquiries from women wanting to be tested for the BRCA gene that increases the chances of developing cancer, a gene which Angelina Jolie carries. Jolie herself has said that the reason she has had this invasive and preventative surgery is so that her children don’t have to say, as she had to say “my Mum died of ovarian cancer”. She goes on to say “knowledge is power”. Women, and of course, men will make their own decisions about gene testing, about surgery and treatment, when that moment comes in the doctor’s room and the news is bad; and for people of faith, these decisions will be made in the light of their own experience too of the presence of God. In our generation, in the West at least, the knowledge we have about our own bodies is unprecedented, and in some cases, to paraphrase Scripture, it seems we do have the power within ourselves to save ourselves. But for all the photographed and filmed hours of her life, still the vast majority of Angelina Jolie’s days are lived without cameras and as for the rest of us, it is in these off screen hours that we come face to face with reality, discovering our capacity for fear, faith, courage and despair. We experience this kind of depth in what you might call the “small hours of belief”, when old certainties have gone and our own fragility comes close. That kind of physical vulnerability tests our faith in God and in ourselves. And for a woman to go public about this, to help others decide what to do, is brave, and worthy of any of her action hero alter egos.