Charlize Theron says she’s “not ashamed” to talk about the moment her mum shot and killed her dad in self-defence. The actress was 15 when her alcoholic dad shot through the door of the room where she was hiding with her mum. “None of those bullets ever hit us, which is just a miracle. But in self-defence, she ended the threat,” she told NPR.

She added: “The more we talk about these things, the more we realise we are not alone in any of it.” Charlize grew up on on a farm near Johannesburg in South Africa with her mum Gerda and dad Charles. She described her dad as a “very sick man” and said living with an alcoholic was a “pretty hopeless situation”.

“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,” she said. Speaking about what happened, she said her dad was so drunk 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.(BBC)…[+]