Ruby Wax said she had the “drive of a Rottweiler” to leave her parents’ home in the US and – had she not escaped – believes she “would be dead”.
The comedian, writer and mental health campaigner, described her childhood as a “lock-in”, watching out of her window “with longing” as other children played with their parents in the park opposite her family home.
The 70-year-old compared her “bizarre” upbringing to the cartoon The Addams Family while appearing on an episode of Kate Garraway’s Life Stories.
Speaking about her parents, who had come to the US from Austria before the Second World War, Wax said: “They took the war from Europe and brought it to the kitchen.
“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 (for me).
“They were pretty violent with each other (and me), you’d have the shit knocked out of you.”
Wax described her teenage self as “rebellious”, continually attempting to escape the family home to get away.
She told the ITV show: “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.
“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.”
Wax, who famously interviewed OJ Simpson and Donald Trump for her 90s TV series Ruby Wax Meets…, recalled a particularly violent episode with her father which occurred in front of her friends.
“My dad once beat me up in front of all my friends, and my girlfriends all made an igloo around me and he was trying to get to me around their legs,” she said.
“I had friends who would literally protect me, that’s why I like large groups of women sometimes because I feel that is my igloo of protection – a comedian was born,” she said.
Wax eventually moved to Glasgow to study drama, before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978 alongside the late stars Glenda Jackson and Alan Rickman – who encouraged her into writing.
She met her future husband, producer Ed Bye, on the set of Girls On Top with Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, and they got married in 1988. The couple have three children: Marina, Madeline and Max.
“I’d never really had crushes, I’d liked boys but I was scared of men, I’d go behind pillars at school,” she told Life Stories host Garraway.
“My dad was a little Trumpy, he was terrifying. If you’re hit by men, you’re going to be scared of men, but Ed was so gentle and adorable – men in America didn’t really have that female streak.”
Wax said it was her sense of anger that helped her survive her traumatic childhood.
She said: “If 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.
“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.”
Wax went on to have a successful comedy career and huge TV success, interviewing famous faces such as pop star Madonna and late actress and writer Carrie Fisher – whom she described as her “heroine”.
When asked why her TV work “dried up” in her later years, she said: “Because I turned 50 and that’s not allowed.”
Wax, who said she has suffered from depression all her life, went on to complete a Masters degree at the University of Oxford in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, charting her own mental health crisis in a successful memoir, I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was, and a one-woman show talking openly about mental health.
She later founded the Frazzled Cafe, for people who want to meet and share their stories, and has co-authored a number of mindfulness books.
“To help people is the ultimate reward,” Wax told the ITV show.
“People, if you’re in showbusiness, come up to you and say, ‘that was really funny, you made me laugh’, but when somebody says, ‘my brother almost committed suicide but he read your book’ then you go woah, was that a life worth living.”
Kate Garraway’s Life Stories returns on Wednesday at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX.
– Anyone who needs support can call Samaritans free of charge on 116 123, email jo@samaritans.org, or visit the Samaritans website.