Actress Charlize Theron is known for being an acting powerhouse and has featured in many blockbusters such as Monster, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Bombshell. The South African native moved to the United States when she was 16 and started her career as a model. She slowly gained recognition for her amazing performances.
However, Theron’s rise to Hollywood stardom is only secondary to her life in apartheid South Africa. She once mentioned a traumatic incident that happened to her as a child, that changed the course of her life.
Charlize Theron’s Rise To Stardom
Actress Charlize Theron is a formidable force in acting as she has delivered powerful performances year after year. Be it in her silent rebellion as Imperator Furiosa in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, or in her mental ugliness in the serial killer drama Monster, Theron brings nuance and edge to all her performances.
Theron has been successful in both blockbusters and artistic films. She has been a part of popular action films such as The Italian Job, Prometheus, and Atomic Blonde.
The actress started out her career as a model and was based in Milan for a while, before moving to the United States. She moved to Los Angeles to try her hand at acting but was initially unsuccessful. She was discovered by a talent agent when she was trying to cash in a cheque but the bank would not grant it as she was not an American citizen at the time.
Charlize Theron had her breakthrough when she was cast in the Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino starrer The Devil’s Advocate. She starred in a bunch of other studio films, slowly establishing herself as a notable actress before she earned an Academy Award for Best Actress for the film Monster. She has since been nominated for the Oscars two more times, once for North Country and the other for Bombshell.
Charlize Theron’s Traumatic Incident As a Child
Before actress Charlize Theron became one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood, she was a resident of South Africa during the apartheid. Theron was raised on a farm by her parents Charles and Gerda Theron.
Theron mentioned in an interview with NPR that she had a troubled childhood as her father was a raging alcoholic. She has reportedly mentioned how much she admires her mother but said that her father was a sick man. She said to NPR,
“My father was an alcoholic all my life. I only knew him one way, and that was as an alcoholic … It was a pretty hopeless situation. Our family was just kind of stuck in it. And the day-to-day unpredictability of living with an addict is the thing that you sit with and have kind of embedded in your body for the rest of your life, more than just this one event of what happened one night.”
When Theron was 16, her father allegedly threatened her and her mother while being drunk and had also reportedly shot at them. Her mother later, in self-defense, reportedly shot and killed him. She spoke about the incident in an interview with NPR,
“None of those bullets ever hit us, which is just a miracle. But in self-defense, she ended the threat. This kind of violence that happens within the family, is something that I share with a lot of people. I’m not ashamed to talk about it, because I do think that the more we talk about these things, the more we realize we are not alone in any of it.”
In an interview with ABC News, the actress mentioned that she admired her mother for doing that and that she would have done the same thing if it was for her daughter. She also mentioned that the incident had made her more aware of addiction and what growing up with an addict feels like.
