Ruby Wax believes she would have perished if she had not gone to the United Kingdom from her ‘violent’ parents.
The comedian was born in 1953 in Illinois to Jewish parents who had fled Austria in 1938 due to the Nazi menace.
Her parents, however, developed a violent household after settling in Chicago and starting a family.
Ruby, 70, described her upbringing as a “lock-in” and said she would stare out her window “with desire” while other children played in the park on Kate Garraway’s Life Stories this week.
‘They took the war from Europe and brought it to the kitchen,’ she explained.
‘They slung these verbal grenades at each other, and I was in the middle, especially because I was born into the land of the free and the brave and I could have a really great life and they were nipped in the bud at 22, so they wanted to make it hard.
‘They were pretty violent with each other (and me), you’d have the sh** knocked out of you.’
Ruby went on to say that she was inspired to leave her native nation and establish a new life in the United Kingdom, first settling in Glasgow to study theatre.
‘I had ambition and the drive of a Rottweiler to survive. I pushed them (her parents) out of the way, and I was very rebellious, I’d creep out of the window when I was 18,’ she recalled.
‘I remember I hitch-hiked at a private airport to get to San Francisco and then, of course, I’d go back (home) and they’d beat me up, and I’d go out again.
‘I did everything to spite them, and they were getting angrier and angrier.’
Ruby informed Kate that her father ‘beat her up’ in front of her friends, and that her fury led her to flee her tragic home.
‘I hadn’t had a whacking great sense of anger I think I would have gone under, but I was addicted to anger for quite a long time, I had to work really hard to get it out of my system,’ she said.
‘For me, it was survival because it saved me, if I wouldn’t of gotten out of there, I would be dead.
‘I have a long line of suicide on my dad’s side so yeah it would have happened. If I stayed there, I wouldn’t have made it. And I got out.’
Ruby mentioned in her Who Do You Think You Are? episode in 2017 that her great-grandmother and great-aunt had been committed to mental asylums in Brno and Vienna because they were incurably’agitated.
During the Life Stories interview, Ruby also stated that her BBC interview programme, Ruby Wax With…, was cancelled because she reached 50, which “wasn’t allowed.”
Ruby accused the firm of ageism, claiming that the network did not want older women presenting chat shows.
Kate Garraway’s Life Stories is streaming on ITVX.
Source My Celebrity Life.
