Inside Charlize Theron's Dark, Traumatic Childhood & How She Overcame Her Past
Charlize Theron may enjoy a glamorous and relatively stress-free lifestyle nowadays, but it turns out her childhood was quite the opposite. In fact, the actress faced some terrible trauma while growing up in Benoni, South Africa.
When Theron was 15 years old, her mother Gerda Maritz shot and killed her father, Charles, after he came home drunk and pulled a gun on her and her mother. Maritz was not prosecuted, and police ruled the case was self-defense.
Since coming into the spotlight, however, the Mad Max: Fury Road actress hasn’t spoken about her childhood much, with only a few exceptions over the years.
While preparing for her role in the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s thriller novel, Dark Places, for example, she got candid about the similarities between the film and her own tragic past.
Speaking to French TV station TF1, via Us Weekly, Theron told them, “There’s definitely an acknowledgment on my part that I had an experience of a very traumatic experience, an event, in my life. And somehow it’s formed me.”
The Oscar-winning star then went on to explain the trauma that her character, Libby Day, goes through is similar to that which she faced when she was a little girl.
“In the film, my character goes through this event when she’s 8 years old, and it really is examining what a trauma like that would do to a child, especially when she’s expected to speak about it,” Theron explained of her character, who testifies in court about the murders of her family members. “And that’s definitely something that I can relate to, that’s definitely something that I’ve experienced in my life.”
“As far as events go, they’re very similar,” she said of her character and her own life. “There’s a murder mystery, and my situation was a very unfortunate incident with self-defense.”
A few years later, Theron opened up even more during Howard Stern’s radio show. According to the Monster star, she dealt with the situation by just pushing it under the rug at first. “I just pretended like it didn’t happen,” she remembered, per People. “I didn’t tell anybody — I didn’t want to tell anybody. Whenever anybody asked me, I said my dad died in a car accident. Who wants to tell that story? Nobody wants to tell that story.”
Looking back, Theron knows why she kept it a secret for so long. “I didn’t want to feel like a victim,” she said. “I struggled with that for many years until I actually started therapy.”
In fact, therapy was a long-winding process that she didn’t fully start healing from until her “late 20s, early 30s.” And, after years of working hard to overcome her struggles, she realized it wasn’t her father’s death that traumatized her the most. “I think what more affected me for my adult life that happened in my childhood was more the everyday living of a child living in the house with an alcoholic and waking up not knowing what was going to happen,” she said. “And not knowing how my day was going to go and all of it dependent on somebody else and whether he was not going to drink or drink.”
Theron then also attributed much of her endurance and bravery to her mother. “I have an incredible mother… She’s a huge inspiration in my life,” she said. “She’s never really had therapy. So a mother who never really had therapy dealing with something like that — trying to get your child out of that. Her philosophy was ‘This is horrible. Acknowledge that this is horrible. Now make a choice. Will this define you? Are you going to sink or are you going to swim?’ That was it.” Talk about incredible parenting!
Theron continued, “I think both of us have dealt with that night really well. I think both of us still have to deal with the life that we had — and that’s what people don’t really realize. It’s not just about what happened one night.”
Indeed, Theron has made a whole new life for herself despite all the terrible things she’s had to overcome in her past. And, of course, her mother’s been by her side the entire time.
A version of this article was originally published in 2015.
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