Guy Pearce became the man of his house at just eight years old after his father died in a plane crash.
The Australian actor has opened up about his tragic childhood during an interview with The Wall Street Journal, saying he had to step up when his dad died. Sturt, who was a chief test pilot for the Australian government aircraft industry and former RAF squadron leader, was just 39 when he died in a plane accident, leaving behind his wife Anne, their son Guy, and their disabled daughter Tracy.
“When I arrived home from school that day, Mum’s friends were there. She took me into her bedroom and told me what had happened. I don’t remember anything after that. I was eight,” he told the publication.
“Years later, my mother said to me in her typical blunt fashion, ‘Well, you went really weird after your dad died. I thought about getting you a psychiatrist’. That was probably her sarcastic way of showing sympathy.”
The Memento star explained that because Tracy has an intellectual disability, he had to become the “family dad” at a young age.
“Mum was very clever about easing me into the role. She didn’t say, ‘I need you to help me.’ She said, ‘It’s so wonderful that you’re being responsible’.
“We had a TV, and Tracy and I loved our time watching cartoons. I knew when to turn the TV off, do my homework, practice the clarinet and tenor saxophone and help with Tracy and get her to bed.”
The Priscilla Queen of the Desert star has opened up in the past about how losing his dad at such a young age had a profound affect on him.
“Dad’s death probably made me afraid of any unpredictability in my life,” he told the Daily Mail in 2008. “Of course, life contains nothing but unpredictability, and so, as a kid, my nerves were jangling constantly and I operated on this incredibly high frequency all the time.
“It was hard being around people; I just wanted to close the door on them.”
Earlier this year during an interview on The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show, the 57-year-old opened up about how having his son Monte has made him realise how young he really was when he lost his dad.
“What’s kind of really poignant for me right now is my own son is eight,” the Neighbours star explained. “Here I am every day looking at him going, ‘Right.. OK, I was that’.
“I think I remember elements of that period back in 1976, but I don’t really know who I was because I couldn’t look at myself objectively,” he continued.
“Whereas now I have this sort of opportunity to do so… and I’m a little bit fixated on it.”
In the same interview, he said he tries hard not to project too much of his own experience onto his son.
“Not that I’m trying to project that onto him. But I’m even thinking down to like, right, so it was exactly this many days. How old was I exactly the day that dad died?” he said. “It’s particularly poignant because I have my own boy and I’ve got to be careful not to project my own historical grief and sadness onto him because he’s not having that experience.
“I need to make sure I don’t enforce that, or force that on him.”
He also said he used to be fixated on the age of 39 because that’s how old his dad was when he died.
“I spent my whole life thinking about what it must be like to be 39, because that was the age he was when he died,” he explained. “And coincidentally, I was doing a movie called Death Defying Acts when I turned 39.”
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