'My roughest time was when I realised our mum wasn’t coming back,' says Wolverine's Hugh Jackman

 
Frank Thorne24 October 2012
The Weekender

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Hollywood star Hugh Jackman has opened up about the painful day his mother walked out on him and his siblings when he was eight.

The Wolverine actor was living in Sydney with two brothers and two sisters when his mother, Grace, decided to move back to England.

She broke the news in a telegram sent to them the following day.

Jackman, 44, said: “At the time it was difficult. One of the main things I remember is that horrible feeling that people were talking about you and looking at you because it was odd for the mother to leave.

“For many years, I thought it was not going to be forever, so I clung on to that. Up until that age of about 12 or 13, I thought mum and dad would get back together. Finally realising it wasn’t going to happen was probably the roughest time to be honest.”

After Jackman’s parents divorced, his sisters, Zoe and Sonia, went to live with his mother in England while he and his brothers stayed in Sydney with their father, Chris. But Jackman said he has been reconciled with his mother in recent years — and had never felt she stopped loving him.

“I’ve spoken about it at length with her since and I know she was struggling. She was in hospital after I was born suffering from post-natal depression,” he said.

“And then you add five kids into the mix and the fact she had emigrated from England and there wasn’t a support network for her here, plus the fact that dad was at work all day — and you realise that as parents we make mistakes.”

Jackman, who has two children with his wife, Australian actress Deborra-Lee Furness, 56, says in the November issue of Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, that becoming a father helped him understand the pressures on his mother. He added that they are now close and see each other three or four times a year.

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