Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron, born August 7, 1975, in Benoni, Transvaal, South Africa, is an Academy Award-winning actress, activist, and producer who undertook one of the most physically and psychologically extreme transformations in Hollywood history to win the Oscar for Best Actress for Monster (2003) and has built a career of sustained artistic courage and commercial power that makes her one of the most respected performers of her generation. Growing up on a farm in Benoni, the daughter of an Afrikaner construction company owner and a homemaker, she witnessed a traumatic event at age fifteen when her mother Gerda shot and killed Theron's drunken father in an act of legally recognized self-defense — an experience that has informed the psychological depth she brings to roles about survival, violence, and female autonomy. She studied ballet at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg and left South Africa at age sixteen to pursue a dance career in Italy and then New York. A knee injury ended her ballet aspirations, and she transitioned to modeling and then acting, arriving in Los Angeles at age nineteen and supporting herself by cashing a check from her mother when a bank teller refused to help her, an encounter witnessed by a talent agent who signed her on the spot. Her film career produced acclaimed work in 2 Days in the Valley (1996), The Devil's Advocate (1997), Mighty Joe Young (1998), and The Cider House Rules (1999) before Monster (2003), in which she gained thirty pounds and subjected herself to radical prosthetic transformation to play the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in a performance of such devastating humanity that it won universal critical acclaim and the Academy Award. Subsequent acclaimed work includes North Country (2005, second Oscar nomination), Hancock (2008), The Road (2009), Young Adult (2011), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The Old Guard (2020), and Monster sequel Monster (2003) — Tully (2018), Bombshell (2019).