Gerard James Butler^[2] was born in Paisley, Scotland,^[3] on 13 November 1969, the youngest of three children of Margaret and Edward Butler, a bookmaker.^[4][5][6] His family, which is Catholic, is of Irish descent.^[7][8] His family moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, when he was six months old.^[9][10] A year later, when his parents’ marriage broke down, his mother left Montreal and returned to Scotland with Butler.^[11]

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.^[12][13] He also attended Scottish Youth Theatre while a teenager. He did not see his father again until he was 16, when Edward 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.”^[11]

As a student, he was the president of the university law society,^[14] a position he later said he “kind of blagged my way into”.^[3] 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.”^[15]

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, travelled 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.