The death of Chris Anne Affleck, 83, teacher, activist and mother of actors and directors Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck, was announced Friday by the family. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December and died June 2, family said.
Born in New York City in 1942 as Christine Anne Boldt, she went on to teach public school for nearly four decades, including after getting master’s degree at Harvard. She retired in 2008 but advocated for civil rights throughout her life, including in the Deep South, taking inspiration from the original civil rights freedom riders; volunteering for Barack Obama’s political campaigns; and helping found the food-focused Sustainable Cape organization. Ben Affleck said in 2013 that he “credits her for bringing him up to know the rights and wrongs in the world.”
Chris Affleck made her voice heard during public comment periods at community meetings advocating for topics from restorative justice in Cambridge Public Schools to boycotts of companies that support Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip.
“I feel a personal responsibility to do what I can to get people to care,” Chris Affleck said in 2024, as she worked with the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine.
At home on Granville Road in West Cambridge or in Truro, she lived long enough to see grandson Atticus graduate high school on May 31. She died peacefully in her sleep two days later, the family said. The obituary called her grandchildren “the animating force of her last two decades.”
As the mother of Oscar winners, she “was suitably proud of her descendants’ achievements,” the obituary said. But more so “she was delighted when they questioned, defied or cleverly engaged authority.”
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