Charlize Theron

At 48 years old, Charlize Theron has this physical status:

Career

As Theron recalled in 2008:

Theron travelled to Los Angeles on a one-way ticket with her mother, aspiring to work in film. She lived in a motel with the $300 she had been given; she went from paycheck to paycheck, and even went from paycheck to paycheck; she went from paycheck to paycheck; she went from paycheck to paycheck; even to the point of stealing bread in a restaurant to survive. She went to a Hollywood Boulevard bank one day to cash a few cheques, including one from her mother, who wanted to help with the rent, but it was refused because it was out-of-state and she was not an American citizen. Theron argued and pleaded with the bankteller until talent agent John Crosby, who was next in line, won it for her and gave her his business card.

Crosby introduced Theron to an acting school, and she appeared in the horror film Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest in 1995. Helga Svelgen, the hitwoman in 2 Days in the Valley (1996), but despite the film's mixed reviews, her interest in the story drew to Theron, owing to her beauty and the scene where she fought Teri Hatcher's character. Theron feared being typecast as characters resembled Helga, and she remembered being asked to repeat her role in the film over and over. [...]] But playing the same role over and over does not leave you with any longevity." And I knew it would be difficult for me to branch out to new types of roles because of what I look like.

Theron was introduced by co-casting director Johanna Ray to talent agent J. J. Harris while auditioning for Showgirls. She recalled being amazed at how much faith Harris had in her future and referred to Harris as her mentor. Harris will find scripts and films for Theron in a variety of genres and encouraged her to become a producer. She will be Theron's agent for more than 15 years until Harris's death.

Following her success in widely circulated Hollywood films, she had more roles, and her career was extended by the 1990s. The Devil's Advocate (1997), which is supposed to be her break-out film, stars Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino as the haunted wife of an unusually wealthy lawyer. She appeared in Mighty Joe Young (1998) as the brother and protector of a massive mountain gorilla, as well as in the film The Cider House Rules (1999) as a woman seeking an abortion in World War II-era Maine. Though Mighty Joe Young failed at the box office, The Devil's Advocate and The Cider House Rules were commercially fruitful. "White Hot Venus" was on the front cover of Vanity Fair's January 1999 issue. In pictures taken several years earlier when she was an unknown model, she appeared on the front of the May 1999 issue of Playboy magazine, where she later sued the magazine for publishing them without her permission.

Theron began to appear in films as diverse aspirations as an actor in the early 2000s, Reindeer Games (2000), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), Sweet November (2001), and Trapped (2002), all of which, despite achieving only modest commercial success, helped establish her as an actor. "I kept finding myself in a position where producers would support me but studios didn't." Theron remarked on this point in her career: [I began] a love affair with directors, the ones I adored greatly. I found myself making really bad movies. Reindeer Games was not a good film, but I did it because [director] John Frankenheimer] was a fan""

In the 2003 British film The Italian Job, an American tribute/remake of the 1969 British film of the same name starring Mark Wahlberg, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Seth Green, and Donald Sutherland, theron starred as a safe and vault "technician." The film was a box office hit, grossing US$176 million worldwide.

Theron portrayed serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a former prostitute who was shot in Florida in 2002 for killing six men (she was not jailed for a seventh murder) in the late 1980s and early 1990s; film critic Roger Ebert said Theron gave "one of the finest performances in cinema history." She was given the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 76th Academy Awards in February 2004, as well as the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Golden Globe Award for her role. She is the first South African woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress. The Oscar nomination pushed her to the top of the Hollywood Reporter's top-paid actresses in Hollywood in 2006, earning up to US$10 million for a film; she ranked seventh. AskMen also ranked her as the country's most coveted woman of 2003.

Theron was nominated for her role as Swedish actress and singer Britt Ekland in the 2004 HBO film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. On the third season of Fox's television show Arson Bateman's supernatural development drama Rita, she played Rita, the emotionally wounded love interest of Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman), and she starred in the financially struggling science fiction thriller Aeon Flux; she received a Spike Video Game Award for Best Performance by a Human Female.

Theron played a single mother and an iron mine worker experiencing sexual assault in the critically acclaimed drama North Country (2005). "The film, according to Variety's David Rooney, represents a positive next step for lead Charlize Theron. Despite the fact that the demands of a career-redefining Oscar role have stymied actresses, Theron's transition from Monster to a role that is in some ways more successful [...] Both the performance and character anchor the film firmly in the tradition of other dramas about working-class women leading the movement over industrial workplace issues, such as Norma Rae or Silkwood." Roger Ebert echoed the same sentiment, saying that she is "an actress with the beauty of a fashion model but with the ability to find solutions within herself for these important roles in the world of men." She received Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress for her role. In its Fall 2005 issue, Ms. magazine recognized her for this achievement with a feature story. Theron was on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on September 30, 2005.

Theron appeared as a police detective in the critically acclaimed crime film In the Valley of Elah in 2007, and she also appeared as a reckless, slatternly mother in the little-seen drama film Sleepwalking, starring Nick Stahl and AnnaSophia Robb. The Christian Science Monitor praised the latter film, noting that "despite its flaws and the inadequate screen time allotted to Theron (who is a natural performer), Sleepwalking has a core of emotion." Theron starred in the film The Burning Plain, directed by Guillermo Arriaga and opposite Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Basinger, as a woman who survived a difficult childhood, and she also played the ex-wife of an alcoholic superhero alongside Will Smith in Hancock's superhero film Hancock. The Burning Plains saw a limited number of theaters in the United States, but outside the United States, sales totaled $5,267,917. In addition, Hancock earned $624.3 million worldwide. Theron was also named the Hasty Pudding Theatricals Woman of the Year in 2008, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced him as the UN Messenger of Peace in 2008. She first appeared in J'adore Commercials during this period.

Her film debuts in 2009 were The Road, a flashback story in which she briefly appeared in flashbacks, and the animated film Astro Boy, giving her voice for a character. Theron presided the draw for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa, alongside many other South African nationalities or ancestry celebrities. During rehearsals, she drew an Ireland ball rather than France as a joke at FIFA's expense, referring to Thierry Henry's handball controversy in France's play-off match between France and Ireland. The act shocked FIFA enough to fear that it might repeat it again in front of a live global audience.

Theron returned to the spotlight in 2011 with the black comedy Young Adult, after a two-year absence from the big screen. The film, directed by Jason Reitman, received critical acclaim for her role as a depressed divorced, alcohol-obliter 37-year-old ghost writer. "Charlize Theron gives one of the year's finest performances of the year," Richard Roeper said. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and a few other prestigious awards. Roger Ebert described her as one of the finest actors currently active.

In 2019, Theron spoke about her work as a performer. She said, creating a physical appearance as well as the emotional part of the character is "a great tool set that extends everything else you were already doing as an actor." It's a case-by-case scenario, but there is this magical thing that happens when you get both sides: the exterior and interior. It's a really good thing." "I almost treat it like learning" when preparing for a role. I'll be able to sit down and read and play, be a good girl, and my dogs will be the only ones seeing it.

Theron appeared in two big budget films in 2012. In Snow White and the Huntsman, opposite Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth, she appeared as a crew member with a dark agenda in Ridley Scott's Prosecutors. The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle found Snow White and the Huntsman to be "[a] slow, boring film that has no appeal and is emphasized only by a handful of special effects and Charlize Theron's truly evil queen," as the role was "tied in ice goddess mode here, but not as good as the role." Both films were big box office hits, grossing about US$400 million per year. "We're just delighted that Theron can remain on the list in a year where she didn't come out with anything" says Vulture/NYMag. "Any actress with the same talent, beauty, and ferocity should have a permanent home in Hollywood" explains the following year. On Saturday Night Live on NBC, Theron hosted Saturday Night Live on NBC on May 10, 2014. Theron played the wife of an infamous outlaw in Seth MacFarlane's western comedy film A Million Ways to Die in the West, which received poor reviews and modest box office returns in 2014.

Theron played the sole survivor of the massacre of her family in the film version of Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, and appeared in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) opposite Tom Hardy. Mad Max has received acclaim for her character's dominant nature. The film earned US$378.4 million worldwide. In the 2016 film The Huntsman: Winter's War, a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, which was a critical and commercial failure, she reprised her role as Queen Ravenna. Theron performed as both a physician and protester in West Africa in the little-seen romantic drama The Last Face, alongside Sean Penn, was released in 3D stop-motion fantasy film Kubo and the Two Strings, and she also produced the independent drama Brain on Fire. Time ranked her on the Time 100 list of the world's most influential individuals this year.

Theron appeared in The Fate of the Furious as the main antagonist of the franchise's entire story, as well as an intelligence on the eve of the Berlin Wall's demise in 1989, a David Leitch directed graphic novel The Coldest City. The Fate of The Furious was Theron's most widely seen film, and Atomic Blonde was described by Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times as "a slick vehicle for Charlize Theron's magnetic, badass charms, making him a leading action actor on the strength of this film and Mad Max: Fury Road." Theron played an overburdened mother of three in the black comedy Tully (2018), directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. Critics praised the film as "delves into the contemporary parenthood experience in an impressive combination of humor and raw honesty, brought to life by Charlize Theron's outstanding performance. In addition, she played the president of a pharmaceutical in the little-seen crime film Gringo and made the biographical war drama film A Private War, both of which were released in 2018.

Theron produced and appeared in the romantic comedy film Long Shot, starring Seth Rogen and directed by Jonathan Levine, depicting a US Secretary of State who reunites with a journalist she used to babysit. In March 2019, the film was released in South by Southwest and received rave reviews from film critics. Theron co-produced Megyn Kelly's next film role in the drama Bombshell, which she also co-produced. The film, directed by Jay Roach, revolves around the sexual harassment charges made against Fox News CEO Roger Ailes by former female employees. Theron was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Golden Globe Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role, and the Best Actress in a Leading Role. Forbes named her as the country's ninth highest-paid actress with an annual income of $23 million. In 2020, she produced and appeared opposite KiKi Layne in The Old Guard, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. She reprised her role as Cipher in F9, which had been planned for launch on May 22, 2020, but it was postponed until June 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was confirmed that Theron would play Clea in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), beginning with her debut in the Multiverse of Madness' mid-credits scene. In the fantasy film The School for Good and Evil (2022), she is played Lady Lesso. In Season 3 of The Boys as an actor playing Stormfront, the actress appears in a cameo.

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