New York, New York - Hollywood star Charlize Theron opened about the horrific night her mother Gerda shot and killed her father Charles in self-defense when she was just a teen.

"I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone," the actor told The New York Times, adding that she no longer feels "haunted" by the horrific events in the family home near Benoni, South Africa, in 1991.

On that fateful evening, when she was just 15 years old, Theron and her mother Gerda Jacoba Aletta Maritz had gone to the movies. On their way home, the two stopped at her uncle's house, where he and her father, Charles, were drinking.

Theron ran through without greeting them because she needed to use the bathroom, something her dad apparently considered extremely disrespectful.

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Back at home, Theron could feel trouble was coming. She asked her mother to tell her father that she was already asleep when he came home to avoid a confrontation.

"I just knew something bad was going to happen," the Mad Max star told the NYT.

When Charles returned with his brother in tow, he made his entry by shooting through the front door. Theron's mother ran to the safe, grabbed her gun, and rushed into Charlize's bedroom.

"The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn’t a lock on it. And he just stepped back and started shooting through the door," she recalled.

Theron was convinced her dad was out to kill them both.

That's when Maritz ripped open the door, stormed into the hallway, and opened fire. She hit her brother-in-law in the hand and gunned down Charles just as he was about to retrieve more weapons.

The killing was later classified as self-defense.

"I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore," the 50-year-old actor told the New York Times.