Charlize Theron

Biography:

Actress and producer Charlize Theron hails from South Africa and the United States. Among the highest-paid actresses globally, she has won multiple awards, such as the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award. She was listed as one of the top 100 important persons in the world by Time in 2016.

In the 1990s, Theron gained global recognition as the lead actress in the Hollywood productions of Mighty Joe Young (1998), The Cider House Rules (1999), and The Devil’s Advocate (1997). Her depiction of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003) won her both the Silver Bear and the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming her the first South African to win an acting Oscar. She was praised by critics for the role. For her role as a sexually assaulted woman seeking justice in the drama North Country (2005), she was nominated for a second Academy Award.

Theron’s acting credits include The Italian Job (2003), Hancock (2008), Prometheus (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The Fate of the Furious (2017), Atomic Blonde (2017), The Old Guard (2020), F9 (2021), and Fast X (2023). Her roles as damaged women in Jason Reitman’s comedy-dramas Young Adult (2011) and Tully (2018) as well as her portrayal of Megyn Kelly in the 2019 biographical drama Bombshell (for which she was nominated for a third Academy Award) won her accolades.

Theron began her filmmaking career in the early 2000s, producing movies through Denver and Delilah Productions. She has produced a number of movies, including Dark Places (2015), Long Shot (2019), and The Burning Plain (2008), in which she starred. Theron kept her South African citizenship but became an American citizen in 2007. A motion picture star has been awarded to her on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

On August 7, 1975, Theron was born in Benoni, South Africa’s Transvaal Province (now Gauteng Province since 1994). She is the sole child of road construction workers Charles Theron (27 November 1947 – 21 June 1991) and Gerda (née Maritz): 16–18. 16–18, 34 Her great-grand-uncle was military leader Danie Theron, who fought in the Second Boer War. She comes from an Afrikaner family and has Dutch, French, and German ancestry. Her French ancestors arrived in South Africa as early Huguenots.

She was raised in Benoni, close to Johannesburg, on her parent’s farm. On June 21, 1991, Charlize’s mother was physically attacked and a gun was fired at by Theron’s drunken father, who also threatened Charlize. After getting her own pistol, Theron’s mother fired back, killing him. Legally speaking, the shooting was determined to be self-defense, hence her mother was not prosecuted.

Theron claimed she was not “fitting in” when attending Putfontein Primary School (Laerskool Putfontein). Throughout her childhood, she experienced regular bouts of jaundice and the antibiotics she received caused her top incisor milk teeth to decay, necessitating their surgical extraction. Theron did not start to erupt permanent teeth until she was almost ten years old.

Theron started attending the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg at the age of 13 after being sent to boarding school. “I grew up as an only child in South Africa, and there was turmoil in my family, but the surroundings were so great,” Theron remarked of her early years in her native nation. There were no Game Boys, no laptops, and no concerts because we were under sanctions, so I spent much of my time barefoot on the mud. This implied that you needed to pass the time.