The cause of death of Ben Affleck’s mother, Chris Anne Affleck, has been revealed after the proud grandmother passed away on June 2 aged 83. According to the death certificate obtained by Us Weekly, Chris was visiting Ben’s home in Los Angeles when she died of a cardiopulmonary arrest, with her time of death being listed as 10:52 a.m.
Contributing factors to her death included pancreatic adenocarcinoma, which was diagnosed in December. No autopsy was performed. News of Chris’ passing broke in late July, and her obituary in The Boston Globe detailed her final wish to be there for her grandson’s milestone.
“Her greatest wish after her diagnosis, however, was to live to see her grandson [Atticus] graduate high school,” the obituary read. “She did so, attending with her family on May 31, 2026. She died peacefully, in her sleep, two days later.”
According to the piece, Chris’ grandchildren were “the animating force of her last two decades,” and she “was suitably proud of her descendants’ achievements, but she was delighted when they questioned, defied, or cleverly engaged authority.”
Chris earned her degree from Harvard University and worked as a public school teacher for over three decades. She retired in the ’00s and followed her passion for activism into working the campaign trail for Barack Obama.
“After volunteering on the Obama campaign trail, she traveled to Palestine/Israel in 2009, and returned home as an organizer with the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine,” the obituary read.
© MediaNews Group via Getty Images“In her beloved Truro, she was a founding board member of the Sustainable Cape project. When her granddaughter’s student activist group needed a space for trainings, she invited them to Truro and attended every single workshop herself, taking notes.”
Chris was also a fierce activist in the ’60s, teaching literary classes in Mississippi during Freedom Summer and protesting the Vietnam War. She welcomed sons Ben and Casey Affleck with her husband, Timothy Affleck, yet the couple divorced when Ben was around 12 years old.
© GC ImagesShe is survived by her five grandchildren, including Ben’s kids Violet, 20, Seraphina, 17, and Sam, 14, whom he shares with his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner, and Casey’s kids Indiana, 22, and Atticus, 18, whom he shares with his ex, Summer Phoenix.
© WireImageBen and Casey were incredibly close with their mom, and she encouraged their acting talent from a young age. Chris was in attendance the night Ben and his best friend, Matt Damon, won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting in 1998.
“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 later told Vanity Fair. “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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