Chris Anne Affleck, who taught literacy classes in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, spent 35 years teaching in public school classrooms and raised two sons who became Oscar winners, died on June 2. She was 83.
Her family announced the death this week, nearly two months later, in an obituary published in the Boston Globe. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December and given about six months to live.
Her own life first
She was born Christine Anne Boldt in New York City in December 1942. She graduated from Harvard, earned a master's degree there, and taught fifth and sixth grade in public schools for 35 years before retiring in 2008.
Alongside the teaching was a life of political commitment that began young. She was among the original Freedom Riders who traveled into the Deep South in the 1960s, and taught literacy classes in Mississippi during Freedom Summer — work that carried real physical risk for the people who did it. She marched against the Vietnam War. Her family's obituary noted that she "reveled in 1960s counterculture."
Her son Ben described the household plainly in a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter: "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. 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."
The Afflecks
She and her then-husband, Timothy Affleck, had Ben in 1972 and Casey in 1975, around the time the family moved to Massachusetts. The couple divorced when Ben was 12.
When her older son's interest in acting became serious, she made the introduction that started it: her former Harvard roommate, casting director Patty Collins, who helped a teenage Ben audition for commercials and television movies.
She was in the room at the 1998 Academy Awards when Ben and Matt Damon won best original screenplay for Good Will Hunting. Both men had brought their mothers — Damon's mother, Nancy Carlson-Paige, sat beside her.
Ben later described the moment to Vanity Fair. "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," he said. "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?"
Ben won a second Oscar, for best picture, for Argo in 2012. Casey won best actor in 2017 for Manchester by the Sea.
The last thing she wanted
After her diagnosis in December, her family said, what she wanted most was to see her grandson Atticus graduate from high school.
She was there with her family on May 31. She died two days later.
In addition to her sons, she is survived by five grandchildren: Casey's children with Summer Phoenix, Atticus and Indiana, and Ben's children with Jennifer Garner, Violet, Fin and Sam.
