Gerard Butler

Butler was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, the youngest of three children of Margaret and Edward Butler, a bookmaker. He is from a Catholic family of Irish descent. His family moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada when he was six months old. A year later, when his parents' marriage broke down, his mother left Montreal and returned to Scotland with Gerard, aged 18 months. Butler was head boy at St Mirin's & St Margaret's High School in Paisley and won a place at University of Glasgow School of Law. He also attended Scottish Youth Theatre while a teenager. He did not see his father again until he was 16, when Edward Butler called to meet him at a Glasgow restaurant. After the meeting, Butler cried for hours, and recalled later: "That emotion showed me how much pain can sit in this body of yours; pain and sorrow that you don't know you have until it is unleashed." As a student, he was the president of the university law society, a position he later said he "kind of blagged my way into". When Butler was 22, his father was diagnosed with cancer and died. He said of this period in his life: "I had gone from a 16-year-old who couldn't wait to grasp life to a 22-year-old who didn't care if he died in his sleep." Before his final year of law school, Butler took a year off to live in California—mostly in Venice Beach, where he held different jobs, traveled often, and, he says, drank heavily; at one point he was arrested for alcohol-related disorderly conduct. Describing his behaviour during that year, he recalled: "I was out of control, and justifying it with this idea that 'I'm young, this is life. This is me just being boisterous.' " After his time off in America, he returned to Scotland to finish his final year at law school. He had ear surgery as a child that left him with a mangled ear. He still suffers from tinnitus and has hearing loss in his right ear.