Rolland F. Bertrand is best known as the father of American actress and producer Marcheline Bertrand and the maternal grandfather of Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie, yet very little has been written about the man himself, his wartime service, or the working-class roots he gave his family before Hollywood ever entered the picture. Born during the Roaring Twenties in Illinois, Rolland lived a life defined not by celebrity but by hard work, family devotion, and a French-Canadian heritage that stretches back centuries to the earliest settlers of Quebec. People who search for his name today are typically tracing Angelina Jolie’s ancestry or trying to understand the modest Midwestern upbringing that shaped Marcheline Bertrand long before she married actor Jon Voight and moved into the orbit of the entertainment industry.
Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Rolland Frances Bertrand |
| Known As | Rolland F. Bertrand, also referred to as “Rollin” or “Rowley” |
| Profession | Businessman and bowling alley operator |
| Nationality | American |
| Birthplace | Illinois, United States |
| Birth Date | June 11, 1923 |
| Parents | George G. Bertrand (1889–1962) and Marie-Louise Angélina Leduc (1894–1981) |
| First Spouse | Lois June Gouwens (married June 4, 1949; she passed away November 11, 1973) |
| Second Spouse | Elke Heidrun Wett (married September 23, 1975, in Clark County, Nevada) |
| Children | Marcheline Bertrand, Debbie (Debra Jeanne), and Raleigh Bertrand |
| Known For | Being the father of Marcheline Bertrand and maternal grandfather of Angelina Jolie |
| Military Service | United States Army, World War II veteran; wounded in November 1944 |
| Date of Death | April 8, 1985 |
| Place of Death | Henderson, Nevada, United States |
| Burial | Holy Sepulchre Catholic Cemetery, Cook County, Illinois |
Who Is Rolland F. Bertrand?
Rolland F. Bertrand was an American businessman, World War II veteran, and patriarch of the Bertrand family whose legacy is most widely recognized through his eldest daughter, Marcheline Bertrand, and his granddaughter, Angelina Jolie. Born on June 11, 1923, in Illinois, Rolland grew up in a French-Canadian immigrant household during the Great Depression, served his country overseas during the Second World War, and returned home to build a livelihood around the bowling industry in the south suburbs of Chicago. He was never a public figure in his own right, and he never sought the spotlight that would eventually follow his descendants, but his values, his work ethic, and the cultural heritage he passed down left an unmistakable imprint on the family that came after him. Understanding who Rolland F. Bertrand was means looking past the celebrity of his grandchildren and into the everyday life of a mid-century Midwestern father who raised his family on the proceeds of a neighborhood bowling alley in Riverdale, Illinois.
Background in the Bowling Business
Rolland F. Bertrand’s career was rooted in the bowling industry, a business he entered through his connection to the Gouwens family. After returning from World War II, where he was wounded in November 1944 during the advance on the Rhine, Rolland took a job at the Parkview Bowling Alley in the Riverdale and South Holland area of Cook County, Illinois. The bowling alley was owned by Roy Gouwens and his wife Virginia, the parents of Lois June Gouwens, who would become Rolland’s first wife. By 1950, shortly after his marriage, Rolland had been named manager of his father-in-law’s establishment, and by 1953 newspaper references identify him as the owner of a Riverdale bowling alley. The bowling business was not merely a job for Rolland but a family enterprise that sustained the Bertrands throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. He was active enough in the bowling community to serve as a sergeant-at-arms for local associations and even hosted the National Bowling Tournament in 1959. His granddaughter Angelina Jolie later acknowledged these humble origins publicly, once telling an interviewer that her mother Marcheline was often mistaken for a sophisticated French actress when in reality she grew up in a bowling alley that her grandparents owned. The Bertrand name also endures in the Illinois bowling world through Bertrand Bowling Lanes in Waukegan, a forty-lane facility that has been a community institution since 1956, though the precise family connection between that establishment and Rolland’s operations has not been publicly clarified in available records.
Marriage and Family with Lois June Gouwens
Rolland F. Bertrand married Lois June Gouwens on June 4, 1949, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Riverdale, Illinois. Lois was born on February 14, 1928, in Cook County, and had grown up around the bowling business her parents operated. After graduating from high school in 1946, she had commuted into Chicago to attend modeling school and worked at Marshall Field’s department store before her marriage. Rolland met Lois while working at the Parkview Bowling Alley her parents owned, and the two married when Rolland was twenty-six years old. Together, they settled in Riverdale and raised three children: their eldest daughter Marcheline, born in 1950 in nearby Blue Island at St. Francis Hospital; a second daughter, Debbie (Debra Jeanne); and a son, Raleigh. The Bertrand household was a working-class Catholic family grounded in the routines of small-town suburban life outside Chicago, and by all available accounts, Rolland and Lois provided a stable and supportive upbringing for their children during the postwar boom years. Their marriage lasted until Lois’s untimely death from ovarian cancer on November 11, 1973, in Los Angeles County, at the age of just forty-five, after the family had relocated to California several years earlier.
Parenthood and Raising Marcheline Bertrand
Rolland F. Bertrand’s most enduring legacy flows directly through his eldest child, Marcheline Bertrand, who was born on May 9, 1950, in Blue Island, Illinois, and raised in nearby Riverdale. Marcheline grew up in the modest environment of her father’s bowling alley, far from the glamour of Hollywood, and her early years were spent in a close-knit Catholic family with her younger siblings Debbie and Raleigh. Rolland was described as a loving and supportive father who, despite not having great wealth, consistently made sure his family had what they needed. In 1965 or 1966, when Marcheline was a teenager, Rolland made the pivotal decision to relocate the entire family from the Chicago area to Beverly Hills, California, a move that would fundamentally alter the trajectory of his daughter’s life. Marcheline enrolled at Beverly Hills High School as a sophomore and graduated from there, eventually studying acting under the legendary Lee Strasberg. Without Rolland’s decision to uproot the family and head west, it is reasonable to wonder whether Marcheline would have ever entered the entertainment world, married Jon Voight, or given birth to Angelina Jolie. The quiet choices of a bowling alley owner from suburban Illinois set into motion one of Hollywood’s most famous family lineages.
Coping with Loss and Family Tragedy
The Bertrand family endured significant heartbreak during Rolland F. Bertrand’s lifetime, most devastatingly the loss of his first wife, Lois June Gouwens, to ovarian cancer in November 1973. Lois died at just forty-five years of age in Los Angeles County, and her funeral was held back at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Riverdale, the same church where she and Rolland had been married more than two decades earlier. The loss left Rolland a widower with grown children, including Marcheline, who was by then already married to actor Jon Voight and a mother herself. Cancer would become a haunting presence in the Bertrand family across generations. Marcheline Bertrand herself was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1999, and after a nearly eight-year battle that also included breast cancer, she passed away on January 27, 2007, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at the age of fifty-six. Marcheline’s sister also died of cancer. Angelina Jolie later reflected on this painful family pattern, noting that her mother had always feared an early death because her own mother had also died young. Rolland witnessed the beginning of this tragic thread when he lost Lois, though he did not live to see the same disease take his daughter decades later.
Life After Loss and Second Marriage
After the death of his first wife in 1973, Rolland F. Bertrand traveled to Europe with his daughter Marcheline and her then-husband Jon Voight, and during that trip, he met a German woman named Elke Heidrun Wett. A relationship developed, and Rolland married Elke on September 23, 1975, in Clark County, Nevada. Elke herself had a teenage daughter named Gabriella from a previous relationship. This second chapter of Rolland’s personal life took him away from the Chicago-area roots where he had spent most of his adult years and eventually brought him to Henderson, Nevada, where he would live out his remaining years. The move to the Las Vegas metropolitan area represented a significant shift from the bowling alleys and Catholic parishes of Cook County, though available records do not reveal the details of Rolland’s professional activities during this later period. His second wife, Elke, was recorded as living in Henderson as late as 1993, several years after Rolland’s death. While this part of Rolland F. Bertrand’s life is far less documented than his years raising Marcheline in Illinois, it reflects a man who rebuilt his personal life after a devastating loss and found companionship again in his fifties.
French-Canadian Heritage and Ancestral Roots
One of the most significant aspects of Rolland F. Bertrand’s identity is the deep French-Canadian ancestry he carried and passed down to his descendants. His father, George Bertrand, was born in 1889 in Goodrich, Kankakee County, Illinois, but all four of George’s grandparents were French-Canadian immigrants from Quebec. His mother, Marie-Louise Angélina Leduc, was born in 1893 or 1894 and baptized at Ste-Anne-de-la-Pérade in Quebec, Canada. The Bertrand family line in North America traces back to Jean Bertrand, who was first documented in Quebec City in 1683 as a laborer and married Marguerite Tessier in 1685 in Charlesbourg. Over generations, the Bertrands moved from Quebec to Kankakee County, Illinois, where Rolland’s father George grew up and eventually married Angélina Leduc. This heritage made Marcheline Bertrand approximately half French-Canadian, and it gave Angelina Jolie a substantial portion of her ancestry from the founding families of New France. Genealogists have traced these roots so thoroughly that distant connections have been identified between Angelina Jolie and other celebrities of French-Canadian descent, including Ryan Gosling, Justin Trudeau, and Madonna. Rolland F. Bertrand’s name sits at a crucial junction in this ancestral chain, connecting centuries of Quebec history to a modern Hollywood dynasty.
World War II Service
Rolland F. Bertrand served in the United States Army during World War II, a chapter of his life that predated his marriage and business career. According to genealogical records, he was wounded in November 1944 during the Allied advance on the Rhine, one of the most consequential military campaigns of the European theater. The specifics of his unit assignment, the nature of his wounds, and the details of his recovery have not been extensively documented in publicly available sources, which is common for ordinary enlisted soldiers of that era whose service records were not always preserved in detail. What is known is that Rolland survived his injuries, returned to civilian life in Illinois, and went on to build a family and career in the years that followed. His wartime service places him among the millions of Americans who fought in Europe during the final years of the conflict and came home to participate in the postwar economic expansion. The fact that he was wounded in action adds a layer of sacrifice to a life story that is otherwise characterized by quiet industriousness, and it is worth noting that his Social Security number was issued in Illinois before 1951, consistent with his return to civilian life after the war.
Why People Search for Rolland F. Bertrand
Interest in Rolland F. Bertrand is driven almost entirely by his position in one of Hollywood’s most discussed family trees. As the father of Marcheline Bertrand and the maternal grandfather of Angelina Jolie, Rolland sits at a generational intersection that connects a working-class Midwestern background to international celebrity. People who search for his name are often researching the ancestry and heritage of Angelina Jolie, who has spoken publicly about her mother’s upbringing and the bowling alley where Marcheline grew up. Others arrive at Rolland’s name through genealogical research into French-Canadian families in Illinois, since the Bertrand line provides one of the more thoroughly documented examples of Quebec-to-Midwest migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The tragic recurrence of cancer in the Bertrand family also draws attention to Rolland’s story, as researchers and readers try to understand the generational health challenges that affected Lois, Marcheline, and other family members. Additionally, because Rolland F. Bertrand was not a public figure and left very little in the way of interviews, photographs, or media coverage, there is a natural curiosity about who he really was beyond the handful of biographical data points that circulate online.
Privacy, Accuracy and Public Information
Because Rolland F. Bertrand was a private citizen and not a public figure, the available information about his life comes primarily from genealogical databases, census records, marriage and death indices, newspaper mentions from the Chicago area, and occasional references made by his descendants in interviews. Every effort has been made in this article to present only facts that are supported by publicly available records and reliable sources, and to clearly distinguish between verified information and details that remain unconfirmed. Certain aspects of Rolland’s life, including his educational background, the full scope of his military service, and his activities during the last decade of his life in Nevada, have not been publicly disclosed in sufficient detail to report with certainty. Where information is limited, this article states that clearly rather than filling gaps with speculation. Rolland F. Bertrand deserves the same respect for privacy in death that he maintained during his lifetime, and readers should approach the available information with an understanding that not every detail of a private person’s life belongs in the public record simply because their descendants became famous.
Also read: Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt: The Quiet Rise of Angelina Jolie’s Filmmaker Son
FAQs
Who was Rolland F. Bertrand?
Rolland F. Bertrand was an American businessman, World War II veteran, and the father of actress Marcheline Bertrand, making him the maternal grandfather of Angelina Jolie.
When and where was Rolland F. Bertrand born?
Rolland F. Bertrand was born on June 11, 1923, in Illinois, to French-Canadian parents George Bertrand and Marie-Louise Angélina Leduc who had roots in Quebec.
How is Rolland F. Bertrand related to Angelina Jolie?
Rolland F. Bertrand was the maternal grandfather of Angelina Jolie through his eldest daughter, Marcheline Bertrand, who married actor Jon Voight in 1971.
What did Rolland F. Bertrand do for a living?
Rolland F. Bertrand worked in the bowling industry in Cook County, Illinois, managing and eventually owning a bowling alley in Riverdale where his daughter Marcheline grew up.
Did Rolland F. Bertrand serve in the military?
Yes, Rolland F. Bertrand served in the United States Army during World War II and was wounded in November 1944 during the advance on the Rhine.
When did Rolland F. Bertrand pass away?
Rolland F. Bertrand died on April 8, 1985, at the age of sixty-one, in Henderson, Nevada, and was buried at Holy Sepulchre Catholic Cemetery in Illinois.
Rolland F. Bertrand lived a life that most people would never have reason to examine were it not for the extraordinary fame of his granddaughter, Angelina Jolie. Yet his story is worth telling on its own terms: a son of French-Canadian immigrants who grew up during the Depression, fought and was wounded in the Second World War, came home to build a family business in suburban Chicago, raised three children including the future actress Marcheline Bertrand, endured the heartbreak of losing his first wife to cancer, and quietly rebuilt his personal life before passing away at sixty-one in Nevada. Rolland F. Bertrand was not a man of headlines, but he was a man whose choices, from relocating his family to Beverly Hills to instilling the values that Marcheline carried into her own life and work, rippled forward through generations in ways he could never have imagined. His place in the Bertrand family tree connects the parishes of old Quebec to the red carpets of Hollywood, and understanding who he was brings a richer, more human dimension to one of the most famous family stories in American entertainment.