It's a common complaint amongst actresses who started out as models or beauty queens that no one takes them seriously. They're seen, they believe, merely as eye candy, girlfriend material, lacking the talent to take on the meatier female roles. Many - the more bloody-minded among them - rebel against this stereotyping, work hard to widen their scope, and eventually succeed in earning their peers' respect. Michelle Pfeiffer was a glowing example of this, and the first four years of the new millennium saw two others follow her. First Halle Berry took the Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball then, two years later,Charlize Theron for Monster. Both movies were raw, disturbing and emotionally truthful, but of the two actresses it was Theron who went furthest. As the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, she left her looks behind entirely, wholly inhabited her character. When her performance was compared to that of Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, it could not be denied that this beauty was far more than just a looker.
Theron was born on the 7th of August, 1975, and grew up on a farm outside of Benoni, a town some 25 kilometres east of Johannesburg. Charlize Theron was named after her father, Charles. Charles was of French descent, while her mother Gerda hailed from German stock - both parents, though, were Afrikaans, born and raised in South Africa. Afrikaans would be Charlize's first language, English her second, and she'd pick up smatterings from the 26 ethnic groups that provided workers for the farm and the road construction business run by Gerda. It's testament to Theron's abilities that she would find worldwide success by mastering a third language - American.
It was a great place to grow up. On the farm she was surrounded by animals, both stray and domesticated. There'd be dogs, cats, ducks, chickens, sheep, goats, even ostriches and Theron would learn an earthy sympathy for them that would, in later years, see her work long and hard for animal charities. When Gerda was away visiting construction sites, Charlize would stay with her nanny and her two kids in a hut. Gerda would make her up a bed on the floor but, as soon as she left, the nanny would put the child in her own bed. This wasn't for reasons of comfort, rather due to the Bantu belief in the tokoloshe, a thoroughly unpleasant creature that might crawl into her head via her ear while she slept, and make her evil. Such stories couldn't help but feed her young imagination.
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