Charlize Theron Opens Up: The Night My Mother Killed My Father

CHARLIZE THERON OPENS UP ABOUT THE NIGHT HER MOM SHOT HER DAD

The Bombshell star shares shocking details about the moment that changed her life.

It was a night of terror. As charlize Theron and her mom, Gerda, desperately held closed a bedroom door in their

South Africa home on June 21,

1991, her dad, George, raged outside.

“My father was so drunk that he shouldn’t have been able to walk when he came in the house with a gun,” the Bombshell actress recalled in a recent interview. As they tried to keep him out, she revealed, “he took a step back and just shot through the door three times. None of those bullets ever hit us, which was a miracle.” Instead,

Gerda fired herself, killing her husband: “In self-defense, she ended the threat.” (Gerda wasn’t charged in the incident.)

Now 44 and a mom of two, Charlize admitted she’s “scarred” from her upbringing.

“My father was an alcoholic all my life. I only know him one way,” she said, reflecting, “And the day-today 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.”

The Academy Award winner is determined to share her story in order to lift the veil on family violence. “I’m not ashamed to talk about it,” she stated, “because I do think that the more we talk about these things, the more we realize we’re not alone in any of it.”

As for her own family, kids Jackson, 7, and August, 4, don’t know the details of their grandfather’s death yet, but an insider says Charlize will be sure they learn from it: “She wants her children to be free to be themselves, but also know how to recognize a bully and stand up to them.”