Charlize Theron reflects on her challenging childhood in South Africa.
“I have memories from when I was really young, seeing really drunk people, and it scared me,” Theron, 50, shared with The New York Times in a profile published on Saturday, April 17. “Like, people crawling on the floor drunk. It became so consistent that it was every Friday, Saturday, maybe even every Wednesday. My dad had built this big bar inside the house.”
Theron went on to describe her father, Charles, as “a full-blown functioning drunk.”
“He had moments where he would go missing, we wouldn’t know where he was and he would usually return in a state that was pretty severe,” the actress alleged. “It would get messy and loud, and my mom’s not a wallflower either. She wasn’t just sitting and taking it. She made it known that she wasn’t happy about his lifestyle. So, it really caused a lot of verbal abuse.”
She continued, “Personally, for me, the worst thing was they would ice each other. There would be a big fight, and then they wouldn’t talk for three weeks. I didn’t have siblings, and that house just went silent.”
Theron’s mother, Gerda, shot and killed her husband in 1991 out of self-defense. Theron was 15 at the time.
While speaking with The Times, Theron clarified that her father wasn’t physically violent toward her.
“He was scary. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk,” she said. “There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal.”
According to Theron, her mom even enrolled her in a boarding school to “get [Theron] out of the house.”
“She was very aware of what it was doing to me,” Theron told the outlet. “All the memories are there, and it’s not that I don’t try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way. Because people tend to just isolate it and want to talk about one thing. It helps to explain that these things build, and they build, and it takes years for things to go as wrong as it did in my house.”
Theron eventually left South Africa when she was 16 to pursue a modeling career in Europe.
“I was so equipped. I knew how to take care of myself. That’s just something my mom instilled in me, my lifestyle instilled in me, my country did,” she said. “You know how to cook, how to sew. I knew more than my kids will ever know as adults about taking care of myself. I knew I would be able to survive, and I also had this real drive. I was so determined to do this on my own and not to fail, because I didn’t want to go back.”
After achieving success in Hollywood, Theron adopted daughters Jackson and August in 2012 and 2015, respectively.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for confidential support.
