KEANU’S PAINFUL PAST
It’s no surprise Keanu’s mum desperately wants the best for him – right from the start, the actor’s life has been marred by sadness and grief. When he was just three, his geologist dad Samuel, who suffered from a drug addiction, walked out on the family.
From then on the father-son relationship was difficult and Keanu never saw Samuel again after the age of 13. “The story with me and my dad’s pretty heavy. It’s full of pain and woe and f***ing loss and all that s***,” the Speed actor once said.
Having an absentee dad was just the start of the trauma he would be dealt over a lifetime.
In the early ’90s, his younger sister Kim was diagnosed with leukaemia and he became her main carer through a decade
long battle against the disease. She eventually regained her health, but great loss was soon to follow.
In 1993, Keanu’s best friend, actor River Phoenix, died at age 23 outside Hollywood music venue The Viper Room after taking a combination of morphine and cocaine.
Five years later, it seemed his luck had taken a turn for the better when he met actress Jennifer Syme. They “instantly fell in love”, but on Christmas Eve in 1999, the birth of their first child went tragically wrong and their daughter Ava was stillborn.
Under the pressure of grief, the couple’s relationship ended and 18 months after their split, Jennifer, driving drunk, crashed into a row of parked cars and was killed instantly. She’d been at a party hosted by goth rocker Marilyn Manson and had been dropped home, but allegedly drove her Jeep back to the do and crashed.
For Keanu, the pain was unbearable. “Grief changes shape but it never ends,” he said five years after Jennifer’s death. “When the people you love are gone, you’re alone.”
Keanu steals the show as swaggering motorcyclist Duke Caboom in ToyStory4 (out this week), but while he’s described as the “nicest guy in Hollywood”, he has never married.
“I don’t have anyone in my life,” he said recently. “But if it does occur, I would respect and love the other person.”