Hollywood
Charlize Theron ‘Not Ashamed’ To Speak About Her Mum Killing Her Dad
Charlize Theron has opened up about the traumatic experience that involved her father trying to kill her.
The 44-year-old South African actress was at home with her mother, Gerda, when Charles Theron, her father, came home heavily under the influence of alcohol.
In 1991, Charles opened fire on his own child and her mother, taking three shots at a door they were both pushing to prevent him from entering the bedroom. Charlize recalls, “My father was so drunk that he shouldn’t have been able to walk when he came into the house with a gun.
My mom and I were in my bedroom leaning against the door because he was trying to push through the door. So both of us were leaning against the door from the inside to have him not be able to push through.
He took a step back and just shot through the door three times. None of the bullets ever hit us, which is just a miracle.” — the Bombshell actress explained that her mother took no chances and grabbed her own firearm and shot and killed Charles.
She wasn’t prosecuted or charged as law enforcement and the associated decision-makers ruled her retaliation as self-defence. Charlize now has two adopted children of her own, Jackson and August, and says she is “not ashamed” to talk about her past experiences with domestic violence.
Theron says, “This family violence, this kind of violence that happens with the family, is something that I shared with a lot of people. I’m not ashamed to talk about it, because I do think that the more we talk about these things, the more we realise we are not alone in any of it. I think, for me, it’s just always been that this story is about growing up with addicts and what that does to a person.”
Her own father was an alcoholic, and it led to these horrendous circumstances, with Charlize explaining, “Our family was just kind of stuck in it. And the day-to-day unpredictability of living with an addict is the thing that you sit with and have kind of embedded in your body for the rest of your life, more than just this one event of what happened one night.”
You can find more celebrity news on our website.
