Charlize Theron (Image: Getty)
Charlize Theron (born August 7, 1975, age: 42) is a South African-American actress and movie producer.
She is known for played major roles in the films That Thing You Do! (1996), The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Mighty Joe Young (1998), The Cider House Rules (1999), The Italian Job (2003), Monster (2003), North Country (2005), Hancock (2008), and The Road (2009).
Theron has also appeared in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), Prometheus (2012), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The Fate of the Furious (2017) and Atomic Blonde (2017).
Theron was born in Benoni, in what is currently the Gauteng Province of South Africa, Her parents are Jacoba Aletta and Charles Jacobus Theron. Second Boer War legend Danie Theron was her great-great-uncle. Theron has no siblings.
She comes from an Afrikaner family, and she is of French, German and Dutch heritage.
Theron was raised on her parent’s farm in Benoni, near Johannesburg. In June 1991, Theron’s alcoholic father threatened both her and her mother in an incident during which he was drunk and physically assaulted his wife. Theron’s mother then shot and murdered him. The shooting was legally determined to have been committed in self-defense, so Theron’s mother did not draw any charges.
When she was 13, Theron began attending boarding school and started studying at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg. Theron’s native language is Afrikaans.
Even though she initially expressed interest in dance, Theron landed a one-year modeling contract at age 16 at a local competition in Italy. She and her mother then moved to Milan shortly afterward.
Theron spent a year modeling throughout Europe. She then moved to New York, where she attended the Joffrey Ballet School. However, a knee injury ended her career as a ballet dancer.
When she was 19, Theron flew to Los Angeles in hopes of beginning a career as an actress. After several months there she made her movie debut with a non-speaking role in the horror flick Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995).
Theron’s first speaking role was a secondary part as a dangerous woman in 2 Days in the Valley (1996). She then gained further acclaim with roles in major Hollywood films like The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Mighty Joe Young (1998), and The Cider House Rules (1999).
Theron starred in multiple films in 2000: Reindeer Games, The Yards, The Legend of Bagger Vance and Men of Honor, Sweet November. She was thus catapulted to near-stardom after these roles.
Theron has said of this period in her career that “I kept finding myself in a place where directors would back me but studios didn’t. [I began] a love affair with directors, the ones I really, truly admired. I found myself making really bad movies, too. Reindeer Games was not a good movie, but I did it because I loved John Frankenheimer.”
After these films, Theron played real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). Her performance earned her several accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actress, as well as the Screen Actor’s Guild and Golden Globe Awards. Theron became the first South African to win an Oscar for Best Lead Actress.
In 2006, Theron landed on The Hollywood Reporter’s list of highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, earning $10 million for both of her next two films, North Country and Aeon Flux.
In 2005, Theron played Jason Bateman’s character’s love interest Rita on the third season of the quirky comedy series Arrested Development. She would reunite with Bateman — and her Bagger Vance co-star Will Smith — in the 2008 superhero film Hancock.
Also in 2005, Theron received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and received Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for her supporting role in the HBO film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.
Theron received her second Oscar nomination for her lead role in North Country (2005). She also received a Golden Globe nomination for her role as a miner in Minnesota who led a fight against sexual harassment in the workplace. It is based on a real case from 1988.
In late 2008, then-United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon asked Theron to be a Messenger of Peace for the organization.
In December 2009, Theron presented the draw for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa, along with multiple other celebrities of South African nationality or heritage.
Theron then took a two-year hiatus from big-screen films and returned in the 2011 comedy Young Adult, which co-starred Patton Oswalt and Patrick Wilson. She received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy.
Then in 2012, she played the Evil Queen Ravenna in Snow White and the Huntsman, and also starred in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, the fifth installment in the Alien franchise.
Theron then played the lead female role in Seth MacFarlane’s 2014 western comedy A Million Ways to Die in the West.
In 2015, Theron played Imperator Furiosa in the summer blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road, which won six Academy Awards. That same year, she also starred as the main character in the thriller Dark Places, based on Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name. Nicholas Hoult co-starred in both films. Theron also co-produced Dark Places.
Theron again played Queen Ravenna in the 2016 film The Huntsman: Winter’s War.
Also in 2016, Theron voiced a monkey in the animated film Kubo and the Two Strings, and the drama film The Last Face. The latter film was directed by Sean Penn and co-starred Javier Bardem and Jean Reno.
Theron also co-produced the 2016 biographical drama film Brain on Fire, which starred Chloe Grace Moretz, Jenny Slate and Tyler Perry.
In 2017, Theron played the villain Cipher in The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment in The Fast and the Furious franchise. Theron also recently played the lead role in the action thriller Atomic Blonde (2017), an adaptation of the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City that also co-starred James McAvoy and John Goodman. Theron co-produced the film.
Theron is also an executive producer of the 2017 Netflix crime drama series Mindhunter.
Among Theron’s upcoming films are two comedies in 2018: the comedy-drama Tully, which will reunite her with director and writer duo Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, who made Young Adult and Juno, and the action comedy Gringo, which co-stars David Oyelowo, Joel Edgerton, Amanda Seyfried and Thandie Newton. Theron will also co-produce both movies, which will be released in April and March, respectively. Mackenzie Davis, Mark Duplass and Ron Livingston co-star in Tully, in which Theron plays a bisexual mom who is a mother of three and who befriends her babysitter.
In 2019, Theron will star in the comedy film Flarsky alongside Seth Rogen, Bob Odenkirk and Andy Serkis.
In November 2009, Theron answered questions from uinterview.com users in an exclusive interview about her post-apocalyptic film The Road, which co-starred Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Theron played Mortensen’s character’s wife in a series of flashbacks.
The movie is based on Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel of the same name.
“My really good friend Nick Wexler, who I’ve done five movies with, is the producer of the film, and we’re really good friends, and he called me and we were just casually talking about the book,” Theron explained about how she first got involved with the film. “And I mentioned to him how much I loved the book. And so when we was in production and they were casting, I think he brought me up to John Hillcoat, the director, and they called me, and I said I’d be honored to come out and work for a couple of days on it.”
Theron also praised both her main co-stars:
“Pretty much every moment with Viggo is memorable,” she said. “He’s an incredibly powerful actor. And I’d have to say the surprise of the shoot for me was the little boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee, who just really blew both me and Viggo away. There was something just unbelievably powerful about being around this kid and watching him play this character. So it was material that I loved, and it was just a pleasure to work with everybody on this.”
Theron is 5-foot-10 and weighs 121 pounds. She dated Irish actor Stuart Townsend from 2001 to 2010. The pair met on the set of the 2002 crime thriller Trapped. She then started a relationship with actor-director Sean Penn from December 2013 to June 2015. Penn and Theron were engaged in December 2014 but ended their relationship just six months later.
Theron obtained American citizenship in 2007 but kept her South African citizenship. Her Twitter handle is @CharlizeAfrica, and her Instagram name is @charlizeafrica.
She has two children, (a boy and a girl) both adopted in 2012 and 2015.
Theron created the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project (CTAOP) in 2007 in the hopes of supporting African young people in the battle against HIV/AIDS.
Theron has supported several women’s rights organizations and has participated in pro-choice rallies. Theron also is a defender of animal rights and an active member of PETA. She also supports gay marriage. She has publicly stated that she refuses to get married until same-sex marriage is legal in the United States.
While shooting Aeon Flux in Berlin, Germany, Theron sustained a herniated disc in her neck, caused by a fall. She was forced to wear a neck brace for one month.
Theron has appeared in advertising campaigns for Dior and Raymond Weil watches, among other companies.
Quotes:
On early modeling career as a teenager: “I went to New York for three days to model, and then I spent a winter in New York in a friend’s windowless basement apartment. I was broke, I was taking class at the Joffrey Ballet, and my knees gave out. I realized I couldn’t dance anymore, and I went into a major depression.”
“I grew up on Bette Davis movies, and Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe.”
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