Early life
Theron was born in
Benoni, in the then Transvaal Province (now Gauteng Province) of South Africa,
the only child of road
constructionists
Gerda (born Maritz):16-18 and Charles Theron (27 November 1947 – 21 June
1991).:16-18, 34
Second Boer War military
leader Danie Theron was her great-great-uncle. :14 She is from an Afrikaner
family, and
her ancestry
includes Dutch as well as French and German; her French forebears were early
Huguenot settlers in South Africa. :14 "Theron" is an Occitan surname
(originally spelled Théron) pronounced in Afrikaans as.
She grew up on her
parents' farm in Benoni, near Johannesburg. On 21 June 1991, Theron's father,
an alcoholic,[8] threatened both teenaged Charlize and her mother while drunk,
physically attacking her mother and firing a gun at both of them. Theron's
mother retrieved her own handgun, shot back and killed him. The shooting was
legally adjudged to have been self-defense, and her mother faced no charges.
Theron attended
Putfontein Primary School (Laerskool Putfontein), a period during which she has
said she was not "fitting in". She was frequently unwell with
jaundice throughout childhood and the antibiotics she was administered made her
upper incisor milk teeth rot (they had to be surgically removed) and teeth did
not grow until she was roughly ten years old. At 13, Theron was sent to
boarding school and began her studies at the National School of the Arts in
Johannesburg. Although Theron is fluent in English, her first language is
Afrikaans.
Career
Beginnings (1991–1996)
Although seeing herself
as a dancer, at age 16 Theron won a one-year modeling contract at a local
competition in Salerno and moved with her mother to Milan, Italy. After Theron
spent a year modeling throughout Europe, she and her mother moved to the US,
both New York City and Miami. In New York, she attended the Joffrey Ballet
School, where she trained as a ballet dancer until a knee injury closed this
career path.As Theron recalled in 2008:
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 a class at the Joffrey
Ballet, and my knees gave out. I realized I couldn't dance anymore, and I went
into a major depression. My mom came over from South Africa and said,
"Either you figure out what to do next or you come home because you can
sulk in South Africa".
In 1994, Theron flew to
Los Angeles, on a one-way ticket her mother bought for her, intending to work
in the film industry. During the initial months there, she lived in a motel
with the $300 budget that her mother had given her;[6] she continued receiving
cheques from New York and lived "from paycheck to paycheck" to the
point of stealing bread from a basket in a restaurant to survive. One day, she
went to a Hollywood Boulevard bank to cash a few cheques, including one her
mother had sent to help with the rent, but it was rejected because it was
out-of-state and she was not an American citizen. Theron argued and pleaded
with the bank teller until talent agent John Crosby, who was the next customer
behind her, cashed it for her and gave her his business card.
Crosby introduced Theron
to an acting school, and in 1995 she played her first non-speaking role in the
horror film Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. Her first speaking role
was Helga Svelgen the hitwoman in 2 Days in the Valley (1996), but despite the
movie's mixed reviews, attention drew to Theron due to her beauty and the scene
where she fought Teri Hatcher's character. Theron feared of being typecast as
characters similar to Helga and recalled being asked to repeat her performance
in the movie during auditions: "A lot of people were saying, 'You should
just hit while the iron's hot' But playing the same part over and over doesn't
leave you with any longevity. And I knew it was going to be harder for me, because
of what I look like, to branch out to different kinds of roles".
Since the early 2000s, Theron has ventured into film production
with her company Denver and Delilah Productions. She has produced numerous
films, in many of which she had a starring role, including The Burning Plain
(2008), Dark Places (2015), and Long Shot (2019). Theron became an American
citizen in 2007 while retaining her South African citizenship. She has been
honored with a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
When auditioning for
Showgirls, Theron was introduced to talent agent J. J. Harris by the co-casting
director Johanna Ray. She recalled being surprised at how much faith Harris had
in her potential and referred to Harris as her mentor. Harris would find scripts
and movies for Theron in a variety of genres and encouraged her to become a
producer. She would be Theron's agent for over 15 years until Harris's death.
Rise to fame (1997–2002)
Larger roles in widely
released Hollywood films followed, and her career expanded by the end of the
1990s. In the horror drama The Devil's Advocate (1997), which is credited to be
her break-out film, Theron starred alongside Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino as the
haunted wife of an unusually successful lawyer. She subsequently starred in the
adventure film Mighty Joe Young (1998) as the friend and protector of a giant
mountain gorilla and in the drama The Cider House Rules (1999), as a woman who
seeks an abortion in World War II-era Maine. While Mighty Joe Young flopped at
the box office, The Devil's Advocate and The Cider House Rules were
commercially successful. She was on the cover of the January 1999 issue of
Vanity Fair as the "White Hot Venus". She also appeared on the cover
of the May 1999 issue of Playboy magazine, in photos taken several years
earlier when she was an unknown model; Theron unsuccessfully sued the magazine
for publishing them without her consent.
