The actress opened up in Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast
Ruby Wax has spoken about her difficult childhood(Image: Jo Hale, WireImagevia Getty Images)
I’m a Celeb star Ruby Wax has already taken the jungle by storm, returning to camp with 10 stars alongside campmate Angry Ginge in the first Bushtucker Trial of the series. The British-American actress, 72, has had a long and thrilling career, but life hasn’t always been easy for the star.
Ruby revealed a heartbreaking confession about her late parents during a frank discussion about her challenging childhood. The comedian and broadcaster offered glimpses over the years into life with her parents, Edward and Berta Wachs, who fled Vienna for the US in the 1930s amid the growing threat of the Nazis and the Second World War.
Ruby, who has previously spoken openly about her difficult upbringing, would subsequently relocate to the UK and collaborate with the Royal Shakespeare Company before landing a position with the BBC in the early 1990s.
Ruby relocated to the UK and landed a job with the BBC in the 1990s(Image: Simone Padovani/Awakening, Getty Images)
During an appearance on the Great Company with Jamie Laing podcast back in January, she discussed how her parents were “torturous”, one of whom “innocently” whilst the other was “on purpose”, but emphasised that her father was “mean” and would engage in “mind games”, reports the Mirror.
Ruby said: “Well, you know, I wrote about it in my book, I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was, and other books. And this is not all I talk about, but they were torturous, both of them – in my mother innocently and my dad on purpose. You know, he’d play mind games. He’d keep telling me how rich I was.”
She added: “You know, he’d take me to the bank and rattle some papers downstairs, going, ‘Boy, are you rich’. It turned out I wasn’t at all, but it kept me at home till I was, you know, (in) my late 30s. I thought we were really rich and every time he’d do something vicious, I’d write down a number saying he owes me this much; he owes me this much. If there was a beating, I charged a lot.”
She continued, saying her mother was “hysterical” and Ruby could joke that she was “on the ceiling with Q-tips”, adding that she was “never without a sponge”.
Ruby further stated they brought the “war from Europe into our kitchen”, but she “can’t blame it on the war, but he was mean”. She shared that her father would call her a “sad sack”, an “idiot” and questioned who would marry her.
The comedian revealed it “never stopped”, with the comments even happening when she had done well. When host Jamie Laing asked Ruby if she loved her parents, she responded “no, I didn’t”, although she admitted that she does in a “primal way”.
However, she said she didn’t “really know who they were” and wasn’t “really upset” when they passed away. In 2023, the Mail reported, Ruby told Kate Garraway’s Life Stories: “‘They were pretty violent with each other (and me), you’d have the sh** knocked out of you.”
In a separate article from the Mail in 2017, it was reported that Ruby had appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? During the episode, she discovered that her father had been imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis for his Jewish faith, but her parents never told her.
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