The Odyssey‘s Samantha Morton has opened up about being homeless amid her mother’s mental health issues and father’s battle with alcoholism.
“I went pillar to post with foster families, homeless hostels, sleeping by the bins at the back of the Co-op,” Morton, 49, told The Sunday Times in an article published on Saturday, August 1. “I have made choices that have always been about survival, because I watched my mum trying to survive and I watched my dad trying to survive.”
The English actress, who portrays the sorceress Circe in The Odyssey, is the daughter of her late mom, factory worker Pamela, and late dad, coal miner Peter. Peter died last year while Pamela died in 2017 from lung cancer.
“Someone told me I was resilient when I was younger,” she told the outlet. “But sometimes you’ve got no choice other than to be resilient because if you are not you’re dead.”
Morton spoke about her upbringing during an interview with The Guardian in 2009, detailing that she lived between her separated parents’ houses up until the age of eight when she was placed as a “ward of court,” which sees a person placed under the legal guardianship of the U.K. Court of Protection.
She revealed during the interview that her father hit her. “I think anybody who has been abused as a kid – and I was abused as a kid, by various people – will say it’s irrational because violence is irrational,” she said at the time.
The outlet detailed that as a ward of court, Morton moved between foster parents and care homes before leaving school at the age of 13 and “spending most of her early teens raving, taking ecstasy and hallucinogenics with older children and young adults, lawless and lost.”
Morton noted that between the ages of 13 and 14, she was homeless for “almost a year” and would sleep at friends’ houses or “in bus shelters.” Despite her childhood experiences, she added that she never blamed either of her parents. “Never, never my parents. Always authority. Always the establishment. That’s because I grew up in Nottinghamshire in the 80s with Margaret Thatcher destroying everything,” she said at the time. “Just because somebody doesn’t bring up their children or can’t look after their children doesn’t make them a bad person. There are all sorts of reasons … illness. There are so many reasons you can end up in care.”
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