Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck’s mom has died following a battle with cancer.
According to an obituary published in The Boston Globe on Friday, Christopher Anne Affleck, died peacefully in her sleep on June 2 at the age of 83.
The Hollywood Reporter reported she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2025, and was given six months to live.
“Her greatest wish after her diagnosis, however, was to live to see her grandson graduate high school,” the obituary reads. “She did so, attending with her family on May 31, 2026. She died peacefully, in her sleep, two days later.”
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Born in 1942 in New York City, Chris proved to be a great activist, teaching “literacy classes in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, marched against the Vietnam War, and reveled in 1960s counterculture.”
She went on to become “one of the first Radcliffe women” to graduate from Harvard, and spent 35 years as a public school teacher.
“Every student, whether just arrived from Haiti or Cambridge upper crust, was a cherished citizen of her classroom republic, equal to each other and to herself,” the obituary states.
After working as a teacher for over three decades, Chris retired in 2008, spending time volunteering for President Barack Obama during his campaign, traveling to Israel/Palestine and becoming an organizer for the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine.
Chris welcomed Ben in 1972 and Casey in 1975, with her ex-husband, Timothy Affleck, before they divorced in 1984.
Both Ben and Casey credit their parents with instilling in them a love for the arts at a young age, with Casey telling Collider in 2013 that they “started out as children doing this” in part because their “father was in the theater and our mother took us to the theater all the time.”
“I got into acting as a young child on account of a sort of arbitrary thing. A friend of my mom’s was a casting director so, really as kind of a lark,” Ben told Parade in October 2007. “I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.”
Ben later had his big break when he won the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1998, alongside Matt Damon, for their work writing “Good Will Hunting.”
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Both Ben and Damon brought their mothers with them as their plus-ones for the big ceremony.
“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 in April 2023. “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?”
He continued, “There was nobody else that was going to go. That was it. Of course, our moms were gonna go. That was really innocent and not faked.”
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In addition to her two sons, Chris is survived by her five grandchildren: Casey’s two children, Indiana and Atticus, and Ben’s three children, Violet, Fin and Sam.
