Arnold Schwarzenegger recalls as a youngster ‘waking up with our hearts pounding’ due to dread of maltreatment at the hands of his own father.
In a forthcoming Netflix documentary about his life, the Terminator actor, 75, discusses his traumatic childhood with his Nazi-supporting father Gustav and mother Aurelia.
In the series, the Fubar star referred to Gustav as a ‘tyrant’ who forced him and his brother, Meinhard, who died in a car accident in 1971, to ‘earn breakfast’ by competing in competitions.
Arnie tells the programme markers his brother who was ‘more delicate’ could not sustain that ‘brutality we got at home, the beatings.’
Opening up about his father, the Predtor actor details: ‘There is a kind of schizophrenic behaviour that my brother and I witnessed at home.
‘There was the kind father, and other times when my father would come home drunk at three in the morning and he would be screaming.
He continues according to the Daily Mail: ‘We’d wake up with our hearts pounding and we knew at any time he could strike my mother or go crazy, so there was this kind of strange violence.’
The Predator actor claimed his difficult life inspired him to achieve success at an early age and leave Austria, eventually establishing a weight-lifting and Hollywood career in the United States.
In 2004, Arnold first revealed the abuse suffered at the hands of his father, telling Fortune Magazine his ‘hair was pulled and I was hit with belts.’
‘It was simply the way it was,’ the Total Recall star explained at the time. Many of the youngsters I’ve met had their parents break them, which was the German-Austrian attitude.
‘Break the will. They didn’t want to create an individual. It was all about conforming.” But he went on: “I was one who did not conform and whose will could not be broken.
‘Therefore I became a rebel. Every time I got hit, and every time someone said, “You can’t do this,” I said, “This is not going to be for much longer, because I’m going to move out of here. I want to be rich. I want to be somebody.”‘
In Arnold, the action star also discusses the heartbreaking time he revealed his romance with maid Mildred Baena, 61, to his ex-wife, Maria Shriver.
While still married to Maria, he had son Joseph, now 31 years old, with Mildred.
Arnold is available to stream on Netflix from June 9.
