Less than two weeks after Angelina Jolie described her decision to have a double mastectomy to avoid breast cancer in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, her aunt, Debbie Martin, has died of the disease in Escondido, Calif., The Associated Press reported. She was 61 and died on Sunday.

Ms. Martin was the younger sister of Ms. Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who died of ovarian cancer in 2007. Ms. Jolie wrote in The Times on May 14 that it was her mother’s death and the presence of a defective gene, BRCA1, which increases her risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer, that prompted her to have preventive surgery.

Ron Martin, Ms. Martin’s husband, confirmed to The A.P. that she also had the BRCA1 gene, but was not aware of it until after her 2004 cancer diagnosis. “Had we known, we certainly would have done exactly what Angelina did,” he said.

He added that after learning she had breast cancer his wife had her ovaries removed because, like several other women in her family, she had a high genetic risk for ovarian cancer.