Charlize: Life's One Helluva Ride

and versatile author. His award-winning first novel, published in 2007, was followed by a psychological thriller in 2009.

The first-ever biography of Hollywood’s brightest star from Africa. “When you work, you work, and when you live life, you live life. I know for a fact I am going to lie on that deathbed, when-

In this book he succeeds in presenting a balanced and candid portrait of Charlize

ever that will be, and say: ‘This has been one helluva ride’.” Charlize, 20 April 2008

Theron through unprecedented access to significant people who had an impact on her childhood and early career, and exhaustive research of the mainstream media. He also visits the places that had a forming influence on her childhood and adult profession. The result is a gripping combination of research, journalistic skills, empathy – and wonder.

GALLO IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES

Includes 40-page photo essay. Also available in Afrikaans as Charlize: Ek leef my droom

CHRIS KARSTEN

ISBN: 978-0-7981-5028-6 Human & Rousseau Cape Town Pretoria www.humanrousseau.com

Charlize Life’s one helluva ride

CHRIS KARSTEN is an experienced journalist

T

he secret of Charlize Theron’s incredible achievements in the cut-throat world that

is Hollywood is told here for the first time, with previously unknown facts. Her faith and belief in herself, the passionate way in which she pursues her dreams, and her love of her art: it is all told in this remarkable tale. Her extraordinary success makes her life appear near perfect, yet she has survived a childhood marred by sadness. From an early age she daydreamed, fantasised, danced, performed and escaped from her unhappy home by hiding in the protective darkness of the movie house. After her father’s tragic death, fantasy had to make way for reality: she had to move to Hollywood and become the star she dreamed of being. Her name and face are instantly recognisable to millions of people across the globe, yet she remains one of the most private public figures of her time.

Charlize Life’s one helluva ride CHRIS KARSTEN

This riveting biography follows Charlize’s meteoric career path, and offers rare insights into her childhood and family background.

Charlize

Charlize Life’s one helluva ride CHRIS KARSTEN

Cape Town Pretoria

This book was published in Human & Rousseau’s fiftieth anniversary year.

Copyright © 2009 Chris Karsten Published in 2009 by Human & Rousseau, an imprint of NB Publishers, 40 Heerengracht, Cape Town English translation by Elsa Silke Text editor: Russel Brownlee Cover photograph: Gallo Images/Contour Photos Cover design: Anton Sassenberg Typography by petaldesign Set in 10.5 on 14.5 pt Minion Printed and bound by Paarl Print, Oosterland Street, Paarl, South Africa ISBN 10: 0-7981-5028-9 ISBN 13: 978-0-7981-5028-6 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

For Sim o ne

Contents Childhood 11 Pilgrim 11 Roots 14 Tomboy 22 Grandmother 29

Monster risk, 2002–2003 167

Benoni, 1991 34

Mother and daughter 167 Aileen Wuornos 172 The killings 177 Patty Jenkins 182 Lesbian roles 186

Tragedy 34 Mystery 49

Oscar triumph 191

En route, 1991–1992 53 Winner 53 Model 62 Ballerina 66

Los Angeles, 1993 71 Hollywood 71 The casting couch 80 Tantrum 85

First roles, 1994–1995 88 Breakthrough 88 Animals 94 Villa 99

The Next Big Thing, 1996 103 “Am I a star?” 103

Debate 191 The pinnacle 196

The new Charlize 204 Reinvention 204 Nudity 210 Controversy 215 Youth project 228

Miners and comic strips, 2004–2006 230 North Country 230 Ugly roles 236 Money matters 243 Wardrobe 250

The film maker, 2007–2009 258 American citizen 258 Troubled women 262

Out of Africa, 1997–1998 115

Approaching 40 279

Betrayal 115 The rocker 119 “I’m here!” 124

Notes 285

After the first wave, 1999–2001 135 Father and daughter 135 Razzie 146 Hedonist 150 Irish love 155

Living the dream 279

List of references 287 Danie Theron’s genealogical register 296 Police statements 298 Charles Theron’s estate 299 2004 Oscar winners 300 Filmography 301

Hero worship is the cornerstone on which Hollywood is built. Yet sometimes a person emerges from this dream factory who is admired for more than fame alone. Charlize Theron is not just another pretty face. She has an arsenal of words that would make a seasoned sailor blush; in jeans and sneakers, she’ll take on a pub filled with men and beat them at darts, and in her evening gown, she’ll outdo Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher at Hollywood Dominoes. She has a raucous laugh, she’s bold, even cheeky. She’s unpretentious, and in her stilettos she towers unashamedly above the rest of the company. To take her for a dumb blonde would be a mistake: she has ice in her veins. You don’t make a blonde joke in Charlize’s presence without the uneasy feeling that she just might break your neck. What is the secret that has enabled her to progress from a plot at Putfontein to a place in the pantheon of stars? It was certainly more than mere luck or coincidence. Her stunning looks have been an advantage. But she possesses other remarkable qualities too. She has faith in herself and perseveres in the tireless pursuit of a dream. As a teenager, she saw the movie Splash, starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah, and was convinced that she could have done a better job of playing the mermaid. Still, thousands of young girls with similar qualities and dreams arrive in Hollywood every year, and few of them succeed. In the early nineties the musician and singer Jackson Browne, known for his two hit albums, The Pretender and Running on Empty, was still romantically linked with Daryl Hannah. In “Boulevard”, he sings about the hope and despair of aspiring young actresses in Hollywood:

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Down at the golden cup / They set the young ones up / Under the neon light / Selling day for night / The hearts are hard and the times are tough / Down on the boulevard the night’s enough / Nobody knows you / Nobody owes you nothin’ / Nobody shows you what they’re thinking / Nobody baby . . . These words did not turn out to be true of the tough Afrikaans-speaking South African girl who arrived in Hollywood in 1993. Just fourteen years later, at the beginning of September 2007, an entire street block on one of those very boulevards that Browne had been singing about was closed off for three days during the filming of Hancock, in which Charlize co-starred with Will Smith. An irate motorist remarked to a reporter: “It’s bad enough when there’s a major premiere on Hollywood Boulevard – that snarls up the traffic. But for three days? Not everyone in this town is a tourist or a member of the film industry.” He was probably unaware that the film’s female lead had been discovered on that very same Hollywood Boulevard. Today she’s a member of the A list, has an Oscar on her mantelpiece and an established career as a film maker. Before the release of Hancock in 2008, she was asked whether the hue and cry of Hollywood didn’t make her yearn for a more carefree lifestyle, like the one she used to enjoy in Benoni. “My life is carefree,” was her reply. “When I started acting I had no real training, I had no real knowledge of this industry. I read a lot of biographies of the greats – the Marlon Brandos and James Deans. They were very tortured method actors. I thought that if I want to be really good at that, this is what I had to do. I did it. And I hated it. I had a moment when I said: if this is what it is, I don’t think I can do it. You know, because it becomes too isolated and your life becomes so cold. So I did an experiment. I did a film that was incredibly emotional and I actually had a good time. I made friends and I lived my life and the work was good. I went: Wow, okay! I think, like anything, you have to have discipline. When you work, you work, and when you live life, you live life. “We only get one shot at this. I don’t want to lie on my deathbed and think I screwed that one up. I know for a fact I’m going to lie on that deathbed, whenever that will be, and say: ‘This has been one helluva ride.’”

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Childhood Life wasn’t about my mother walking around saying, “Look how beautiful you are.” It was about, “Did you milk the cow?” Charlize, InStyle, 1998

Pilgrim Few people are ever completely free of their beginnings, hence the occasional nostalgia for bygone places that fill us with vague, pleasant memories. More often than not we are disappointed when we return, for what awaits us is not always what we have hoped for. In February 1997 Charlize undertook her own pilgrimage to bid farewell to Plot 56, a smallholding at Putfontein, near Benoni in Gauteng. It had been nearly six years since she left the house where she’d been a little princess and where her childhood dreams first took flight. It was also the house where her father had died one terrible winter’s night. But by 1997 there was hardly any sign left of her innocent childhood world. Only ghosts still frequented the place. It was a sad farewell, but in Hollywood Charlize was “the next big thing” and the distinction between art and life was growing hazy. Perhaps not in her own mind, but it was evident in many of her shared memories of Putfontein. During those first delirious Hollywood years Charlize often referred nostalgically to her Afrikaner roots, to cow dung between her toes, her pet goat, the stray animals they tended, and children riding to school on donkeys. But in later years certain things she said sounded almost like an amended version of the near-idyllic pastoral scene she had formerly described. Still, she had retained her childhood spontaneity, and it stood her in good stead, combined with a healthy dose of obstinacy, essential for

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survival in Hollywood. After the release of Mighty Joe Young in December 1998, an interview published in the fashion magazine Vogue portrayed her as a combination of girlish innocence, Boer toughness and easygoing sexuality, sort of a South African version of Ava Gardner: “Charlize Theron is a Boer, which in Afrikaans means dwelling on the earth. ‘That is what we were.’” Her own “dwelling on the earth”, that particular patch of earth at Putfontein, could hardly be called a farm; it seems rather like a vague, romanticised attempt to mirror the setting of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. However, Charlize can be forgiven for this misrepresentation, for she was a child, living out her fantasies on a smallholding of two hectares, where she really did live close to the earth and animals. And she does indeed stem from generations of boers (farmers) as well as Boers (Boer soldiers), as she correctly maintains in her American interviews. Today her dwelling is in Hollywood. She no longer lives out her fantasies on two hectares in Benoni; the entire world is her oyster. After her Oscar, a South African columnist wrote that, just as is the case with the angels, Los Angeles owes its existence to the transmission of messages. “But where the heavenly angels sing around God’s throne, the angels of Los Angeles have established their own holy order: their messages proclaim their own glory. That is why they have to work so hard at their ephemeral appeal. Whether one’s opinion of Los Angeles is favourable or not, fact remains that it is the first city in the history of the world to owe its status to the undisguised and sustained creation of illusions. Charlize, South Africa’s queen of the silver screen, happens to be an excellent perceiver and interpreter of such illusions.” In August 2008 I paid a visit to Charlize’s new playing fields, Los Angeles, legendary abode of angels, illusions and narcissism. Following her trail when she first arrived in Hollywood, I found myself at 115 South Fairfax Avenue. On a wall is a life-sized image of a country girl in silhouette. It is no illusion; it is real. There she is, a few bus stops south of Hollywood, in one of Tinseltown’s busiest streets that crosses all the world-famous boulevards with their alluring aura of glitz and glamour (Wilshire, Beverly, Santa Monica, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard itself): a girl with braids and a watering can in her hand. Did Charlize

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feel homesick at the sight of this young girl when she first set foot in this strange town in 1993? Or when she went to the Farmer’s Market diagonally across Fairfax, where celebrities, without their Guccis and makeup on a Saturday, mingle with ordinary Angelenos amid food stalls and the sounds of jazz and country music? Charlize has mentioned the convenience of the Farmer’s Market, where she could buy a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for $1.50 before walking until her feet ached, down to the important agencies in Wilshire Boulevard, or up towards Hollywood Boulevard, specifically the section between La Brea and Gower, reminiscent of the myths and legends of Hollywood, where the white Hollywood sign on the hill behind Griffith Park entices and enchants. She was discovered in a bank on Hollywood Boulevard – the stuff fairytales are made of. (The bank has long since been demolished.) On the corner of Hollywood and Vine is a new high-rise complex with upmarket apartments. In due course Charlize would buy an expensive penthouse in the Broadway Hollywood building, with a view of Hollywood Boulevard, just a few hundred metres from her sidewalk star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The dice have fallen perfectly for Charlize, I thought, my eyes on a waiflike girl of perhaps eleven or twelve – definitely no older than thirteen. She was sitting on a folding chair in front of the Kodak Theatre on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She had long auburn hair and was wearing a red dress, her skinny legs in purple tricots. She was singing to passers-by and tourists, accompanied by a guitarist of fifteen, perhaps sixteen years old. He could have been her brother. Behind them was a small suitcase. On the ground in front of them people threw coins and one-dollar notes. I remembered that Charlize used to sing in a Benoni shopping mall to earn pocket money, accompanying herself on her guitar. This girl stared at me without a smile or a sign of any emotion at all when I took her picture, as if she were looking right through me. Perhaps her heart was filled with dreams that her name, too, would one day be immortalised on a star alongside those of Charlize and Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry. All those famous names at her feet as she was sitting there. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, this section of the street is also called.

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Roots When referring to Charlize’s ancestry, overseas publications have often mentioned that on her mother’s (Maritz) side she is of German descent and on her father’s (Theron) side of French descent. Charlize is directly descended from the first Huguenots who came to South Africa. In 2004, after she had won the Oscar for Monster, the genealogical department of the Huguenot Memorial Museum in Franschhoek, near Cape Town, published an article about the connection between Charlize and Commandant Danie Theron, famous Boer hero of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The article caught the attention of members of the American Huguenot Society, who were busy at the time with a series of projects about the French Huguenots’ contribution to American society, especially in the theatre and the arts. Two years earlier the name Danie Theron had also been in the news worldwide: In 2002, Nelson Mandela unveiled a statue of Danie Theron at the Voortrekker Monument at Fort Schanskop in Pretoria. Having been imprisoned for nearly three decades himself, Mandela, speaking mainly in Afrikaans, paid homage to Theron, who had fought against British imperialism and died for the Afrikaner cause. The original Theron ancestor is thought to be Jacques Thérond, who was born in Nîmes, Languedoc, France, on 11 May 1668 and died at Drakenstein near Cape Town on 2 December 1739. He was married to Marie Jeanne Du Pré of Béthune in Artois, who died in the Tulbagh district in 1763. Daniel Johannes Stephanus (Danie) Theron was born at Tulbagh on 9 May 1872, the ninth of Willem Wouter Theron’s fifteen children. Large families were not uncommon among the unsophisticated farmers of the time, and were certainly not restricted to Afrikaners. Charlize’s grandmother Bettie comes from a large family too, and she had six children herself. On her back porch in Kuruman, at the age of 78, she shared with me the secret of the “old” people’s large families. Everyone went to bed early after a hard day’s honest labour, she said. And they were up before the sun was out. It was customary for the first one awake, usually a child, to wake everyone else in the house before lighting the fire and boiling the water for coffee. It was then, during that short respite before the coffee came, that the chance was grabbed in the main bedroom to extend the family!

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The Boer scout Danie Theron qualified first as a teacher and then as a lawyer and opened his own legal practice in Krugersdorp, just west of Johannesburg. He met Hannie Neethling and they became engaged. But in August 1898, Theron was deeply shocked when Hannie died unexpectedly of pneumonia. Some time after her death a rebellious streak, characteristic of the Therons, made the public take notice of Danie. Six months before the onset of the Anglo-Boer War, in April 1899, W F Moneypenny, fresh from England, had been the editor of The Star in Johannesburg for barely two months. In a climate not at all conducive to good relations between Afrikaner and Brit, Moneypenny deemed it proper to refer scornfully in his newspaper to “the ignorant Dutch”. Like many Boers of the time, Theron had a short patriotic fuse, and demanded an apology from Moneypenny. When the latter refused, Theron beat him up, shattering his spectacles. On Tuesday, 25 April 1899, Theron appeared in court on a charge of assault. His defence was “extreme provocation”. He was sentenced to a prison term of two months or a hefty fine of £20, which his supporters at court promptly collected and paid. Shortly after the war broke out, he established the Theron Verkenningskorps (TVK) – a body of scouts – which concentrated on spying and launching guerilla attacks on the British forces. On 5 September 1900 he was killed in battle in the Gatsrand near Fochville, between Johannesburg and Potchefstroom. His TVK men buried his remains in the Pienaar family graveyard at Elandsfontein, and in 1903 he was reinterred next to his fiancée, Hannie, on the family farm, Eikenhof, beside the Klip River. He had never been married and thus left no direct descendants. One of his brothers was Charles Jacobus (Charlie) Theron, child number thirteen, who later became a farmer and speculator in Namaqualand, operating as far north as Vioolsdrif on the Orange River, the border between South Africa and Namibia. Charlie named one of his sons Danie, after his brother, the Boer hero. Namaqualand is a harsh region, named after its indigenous NamaquaKhoi inhabitants, with place names that speak of a spirited attachment to the soil. Tradition has it that Vioolsdrif got its name from a fiddler simply remembered as Jan Viool.

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It is at Springbok, principal town of this arid region (the springbok is also the national animal emblem of South Africa), that Danie Theron of Pofadder married the attractive Bettie Beets of Vioolsdrif on 8 August 1947, at the onset of Namaqualand’s world-renowned wild-flower season. Bettie was only seventeen and already five months pregnant. Their first child, Charles, was born a few months later, on 27 November 1947. Charles later married Gerda (Maritz) and they had a daughter, Charlize. The genealogy on the Maritz side is still incomplete and has only been traced back to Gerda’s grandparents, Phillipus Rudolf Maritz and Gerda Jacoba Aletta Kruger of Tsumeb (Namibia). Charlize’s grandfather and grandmother Maritz (Gerda’s parents) were Jacob Johannes Maritz and Johanna Maria Barindina Stofberg. Gerda was born at Prieska in the Northern Cape, one of four children. Besides Charles, three other children, Hennie, Danie and Elsa, were born out of Danie and Bettie Theron’s union before the marriage began to flounder. The aforementioned rebellious streak aside, the Theron men often came into conflict with their wives about their heavy drinking. The Theron women, on their part, were strong and outspoken, and would not bend the knee to any man. With her marriage on the rocks, Bettie Theron moved with her three youngest children across the Orange River to the southern region of South-West Africa (currently Namibia), where she met her second husband, Willie Kruger. They had two more daughters, Yvonne and Karen, before he died. Bettie’s eldest, Charles, stayed behind at boarding school in Springbok when his mother moved to South-West Africa. In his final year at school he was head boy. He was an academic achiever and a good sportsman, but his mother chiefly remembers him as a conscientious and hardworking youngster on his parents’ farm. In 2008 I called on Bettie at Kuruman and we spoke about her son Charles and her granddaughter Charlize, who has inherited so many of her father’s good qualities. She spoke of the many nights the boy had slept in the orchard, to be ready in the early hours when it was their turn to irrigate from the canal.

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After all the years, Bettie still became emotional when mentioning her beloved son, especially when she spoke about the manner of his death. And when she spoke of Charlize, whose name combines those of her grandmother and her father (Charles and Elizabeth) and who has renounced her grandmother, I could see that these so-called strong women actually have soft hearts. After finishing school, Charles joined his family in South-West Africa. They were now in Otjiwarongo, in the north of the country. In 1968 Charles noticed the pretty Maritz girl. Gerda’s railway-worker father had died in an accident on 9 February 1968, barely ten days after Gerda’s fifteenth birthday. She was in standard eight, and six years Charles’s junior. Her hair was honey-blonde, her skirts short, and everyone knew her as Koot. Later she became known as Gerda and occasionally she called herself Gerta. But as Koot, she lived with her sister, two brothers and her widowed mother, Hannie, in a station house beside the railway line in Otjiwarongo. She excelled at athletics, but the family was poor and there were few opportunities available to her. In 2004 Charlize lifted the curtain slightly on her mother’s childhood. “She was blonde where her siblings were dark; tall where they were short. And she was not content with the narrow range of options presented to her as the youngest child of the family – to stay at home and take care of her mother. She was very talented. She was a gymnast, good in sports. But it was never encouraged. Many times it was taken away from her. All the other kids left and she had to stay home. At the age of nineteen she rejected this role and left. Years later the days on which she visited her mother were the only ones guaranteed to put her in a bad mood. “I felt the impact of her background in the way she raised me. Everything she didn’t have, she wanted to be able to give me. By 19, when she fucked off, she was like, ‘Now I want all those things I never had in my life.’” (In reality, Gerda did not leave home at nineteen, for at eighteen she was already married to Charles.) At Otjiwarongo, Charles, an attractive young man, was the de facto breadwinner and caretaker of his widowed mother and five siblings. But Bettie decided to move south, back to Keetmanshoop, where the cost of living was

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lower and she would be able to afford a large house with enough room for everyone. Gerda, madly in love with Charles, left school, left her mother, Hannie, and her brothers and sister, and moved to Keetmanshoop with the Therons. Charles found her a job as a telephonist with his employer. For the next two years, Gerda was accepted into the bosom of the Theron family, and Bettie, the matriarch, had her hands full with all the children. Bettie remembers that Gerda, or Gertruida, showed a stubborn streak even then – she wore mini skirts, so shamelessly short that her panties showed at the slightest movement. And her temper! The saying went that she would take out your appendix without an anaesthetic. Charles was twenty-three when he married Gerda on 29 January 1971, two days after her eighteenth birthday. He was working for a road-construction company at the time, and initially he and Gerda led a nomadic life, staying in caravans on road-construction sites in the Northern Cape. Living in such stark isolation, the roadworkers often found distraction in the bottle. Charlize later maintained that her father had initially stopped drinking after his marriage to her mother, but Gerda seems to be the sole source of this information. When Charles and Gerda moved to the Witwatersrand, Charles became involved with the rental and management of the heavy equipment used for earthworks and road construction. When his employer sent him to Scotland for a few months to gain experience, the young couple was keen to make use of the opportunity. By Christmas 1974, after their return to South Africa, Gerda was pregnant. She was twenty-two when their daughter was born on Thursday, 7 August 1975. The delighted father immediately sent a telegram to his mother in the Northern Cape. The telegram, addressed to “Bettie Kruger” and stamped “Birchleigh” (a suburb of Kempton Park on the East Rand) announced that a seven-pound daughter had been born and that both mother and daughter were doing well. Bettie, who still keeps the telegram in an album with many other mementos, photographs and letters from Charlize to her grandmother, thinks that the postal worker who had sent the telegram might have made a mistake when typing “seven pounds”. According to her, Charlize had been a puny little thing, without a single hair on her head.

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But the hairless baby became a beautiful little girl with a soft round head. Her proud father loved to stroke the little head with the palm of his hand. It reminded him of the smooth head of a walking stick, or knobkerrie, and he gave her the Afrikaans nickname “Kieriekoppie”. This pet name stuck with her in an abbreviated form, and to friends and family Charlize became “Kerrie”. Even after the fame brought by the Oscar, the family still speak with warmth and pride of their own little Kerrie who has achieved so much, and her mother still calls her Kerrie in private conversations. Charlize herself has said that her hair didn’t begin to grow until she was four, about the time that they moved to the plot at Putfontein. As she grew older, Charlize’s baby-blonde hair changed to light brown, its natural colour, as seen in In the Valley of Elah (2007). “That’s really me. That’s my natural hair colour. That’s me with very little make-up. That’s what I look like,” she told an Irish reporter in 2008. Shortly after Charlize’s birth, Charles was presented with a chance to start his own business. As always before making any important decisions, he turned to his mother in Kuruman for advice. He hesitated about taking such a big step, for there was now a child in their home in Farrarmere, Benoni. But he could get a contract for earthmoving work at Bapsfontein, and a second bond on their home would enable him to acquire his first machinery. He discussed it with Gerda too and decided to take the plunge. (In later interviews, Charlize often uses the metaphor of swimming or drowning to describe her own journey through life.) It was a sound decision by Charles. At his death scarcely twelve years later, the somewhat exaggerated claim was made that Charles Theron owned more road-construction equipment than the Transvaal Provincial Administration. In 1980 Charles bought a plot of 2,237 hectares at the Rynfield agricultural smallholdings, also known as Putfontein, where there was enough space for his growing business. On Plot 56 in Seventh Road, Cloverdene, about 14 km from Benoni, east of Johannesburg, Charles and Gerda began to rent out construction machinery, and they registered the companies G & C Construction and G & C Plant Hire. It was a rural neighbourhood, and the plot was big enough to park the large vehicles, to accommodate

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the operators, and to keep a few cows and dogs. The industrialisation of the Witwatersrand had already caught up with this outlying plot area, so that it was ideal for running a business, with easy access to the main routes to the East Rand with its adjoining industrial and mining centres, such as Benoni, Boksburg, Brakpan, Germiston and Springs – all the way to Johannesburg. These cities that have mushroomed around Johannesburg, and also those to the west, are included in the name Witwatersrand, where the world’s richest gold veins were discovered in the nineteenth century and are still being mined. A visitor is greeted by the sight of mine dumps, shafts and smokestacks that extend far past Putfontein – a slightly different picture from the one sketched in an interview Charlize gave Tatler in 2000: “She grew up half a world away [from Los Angeles] on an isolated farm near a small town called Benoni, about an hour’s drive through the bush from Johannesburg.” It is this kind of reference to Charlize’s rural background that fascinates Europeans and Americans and surrounds this star from Africa, who began to make a name for herself in Hollywood in the mid-nineties, with an almost exotic aura. And Charlize was clearly reluctant to set the record straight. She has an intuitive understanding of the industry. Not only does she have a love affair with the camera, but she also has a remarkable appreciation of how minds work behind the scenes. She knows the value of perception and image, and what could be more alluring to Hollywood than a breathtakingly beautiful farm girl from Africa? The Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, who won two Oscars despite his outspoken cynicism about the film industry, wrote in his autobiography, A Child of the Century, that fame in Hollywood can be kept alive simply by employing a good publicity agent. Charlize understands this and pushes all the right buttons – relentlessly, some people say. For this she commands the respect of the Hollywood bigwigs, for they themselves are relentless. The years following their baby daughter’s birth were difficult for Charles and Gerda. They worked hard at their new business, but Charles had a passion for work that had already distinguished him as a schoolboy. Gerda was a hard worker too, even though her time was now divided

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between work and the baby. Within a few years she and Charles began to reap the benefits. Charles was proud of his pretty wife and daughter, but even before their wedding people had wondered whether their divergent temperaments would be reconcilable. Charles was sociable and warm, he loved company, and everyone was welcome in his house and at his bar, his sister, Elsa, told me. It was the place where friends and family gathered to laugh and chat and have a good time. Gerda was more private, to the point of appearing unfriendly and sullen when her house was invaded by guests. And she had a sharp tongue. Her husband’s jovial nature and his drinking with his buddies irritated her. The clash of their personalities led to arguments, and when he came home late, she would sometimes lock the doors so that he was forced to sleep outside in the caravan. As far as Charlize’s upbringing was concerned, it was chiefly Gerda who took charge of parental discipline, who plied the hairbrush or the shoe when it was necessary to bend the twig in the right direction. Charlize later mentioned that Gerda had once even grabbed a clothes hanger to spank her with. Her aunt, Elsa Malan, remembers how she once intervened when Gerda had wanted to give Charlize a hiding for neglecting to put conditioner on her hair after spending hours in the pool. Gerda was upset because the child’s beautiful long hair might have been damaged by the sun and the chemicals. About her mother’s discipline Charlize has said: “I got spanked hard on the butt. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. My mother disciplined me. It couldn’t happen in America today, because she’d be put in jail, and to me that’s a very sad thing, because I always deserved it. Never once did I go, ‘God, this is so unfair’. Afterwards I would go up to her and apologize, because I knew that I had been wrong. “She’d hit me with anything that was around: a hairbrush, a shoe – the shoe was a big one. Once I was spanked because I was rude to an older woman in a store. On another occasion I went to school with imprints of Disney cartoons all over my thigh from a hanger that she had grabbed that had all these cutouts on them. I had disobeyed her by eating a bowl of tomato soup while still wearing my school uniform and spilling the soup on my uniform. I deserved that one because that was very disrespectful. She did all the washing and laundry and cooking; she ran the house while

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running the business. I completely understand. I have to be respectful. I am not washing the clothes, she’s washing them.” Charles sometimes raised his voice in an effort to teach Charlize manners, but raising his voice was about all he could manage. He was wary of Gerda’s short temper, and tried to curry favour when he got into her bad books, which was often, for he was no angel. But Charlize was the apple of Charles’s eye. She was pretty and talented, and he liked to show her off. He would urge her to sing when the family were visiting, and she would pick up the guitar and sing and dance. She was born for the limelight. In an interview with the Afrikaans magazine Huisgenoot, Gerda remembers how Charlize used to take her guitar to school to entertain the other children when she was in the first grade. At twelve she played the guitar in a shopping mall in Benoni and on a good day she would earn R50 in pocket money.

Tomboy On the smallholding Charlize developed into a pretty little toddler. At the age of six, she was already showing a love and an aptitude for dance, and she was taken to her first dance lesson. In 1997, during the first wave of interviews after the release of her first two films, 2 Days in the Valley and That Thing You Do!, she said that ballet had been her substitute for the movies. When she danced, she imagined that she was a princess or a fairy. In that way she had always acted in her own little movies, she said. After the release of these films, there was an almost insatiable demand to talk to this ravishing young beauty from Africa, to ask her opinions about everything under the sun. Her face and body sold magazines from Turkey to Sweden, from Hungary to Australia, and her publicity footwork was nimble and spontaneous, her sensuality fresh yet restrained. She knew the game: the secret not to reveal everything at once, to tease. In an interview in 1998 she remembers her growing-up years: “It was the kind of village where kids rode donkeys to school. My best friend was my pet goat named Bok. I was the kind of child who had incredible dreams. I’d want to be a guitar player and a dancer and always my mother would try to accommodate those dreams.”

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In another interview she says: “I didn’t grow up wealthy, but every dream I had, even if it was crazy, my mother took seriously. If one week I said I wanted to be a classical guitar player, somehow I ended up getting guitar lessons. If I said, ‘Mom, I want to paint,’ she’d say, ‘Okay – art classes.’ When I wanted to perform, she’d pull all the men out of a business meeting and make them sit in the living room where I’d lip-synch and dance in her outfits and shoes. That’s how I grew up. Whenever people were around, it was: Entertain!” Charlize began her school career at the Putfontein Primary School, about three kilometres from their plot in Seventh Road. As befits a conservative Afrikaans community, the Dutch Reformed Church of the Benoni East congregation was next-door to the school and they shared the enormous shade trees in Church Street. It was a place where children went to school in bare feet. Did they really ride to school on donkeys? Well, perhaps, but I doubt it. In 2008 I heard a story that Charlize had driven to school in an electric golf cart, or, alternatively, a beach buggy. The golf cart is possible, for her father spoilt her rotten. But the donkeys, I suspect, were invented later as part of a fictional supporting cast in this small pastoral tableau. Charlize was a happy, spontaneous child, with the confidence often seen in only children, and she had her own streak of stubbornness as well. She was a tomboy, who liked to play and compete with boys. She enjoyed the outdoors and the space the plot offered. To a small child, two hectares is certainly almost a farm. Here she swam, rode on horseback, and on one occasion fell off a horse, breaking her collarbone. At six she began to take private ballet lessons. She also loved sport. At school she took part in athletics and she was a member of the standard-two netball team. Sally Beal was her second-grade teacher at the Putfontein Primary School, where Charlize would later be elected head girl, like her father, who had been head boy at Springbok. Sally said it was obvious even at such a young age that this child was special. Retseh Jansen, one of Charlize’s best friends at primary school, remembers how Charlize immersed herself in her fantasy world. They were too

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small then to know about Hollywood, she said, but Charlize had been convinced that one day she would be on TV. Jansen also remembers that Charlize’s wealthy father had spoilt his only child. There was nothing the seven-year-old Charlize enjoyed more than entertaining her schoolfriends by singing and dancing. Even if these performances did not always go according to plan, Charlize was never fazed. She once stumbled and fell in front of the entire school during a ballet performance. Any other child might have burst into tears, but Charlize just smiled, tugged at her dress, and kept dancing as if nothing was wrong. Beal thinks it was this quality that might have helped her through the family’s trauma in later years. On grainy home movies she flutters across the stage like a butterfly, brimming with confidence. Charlize enjoyed any kind of dance, as is evident from photos from her primary-school days, where she is even seen to do volkspele, a traditional Afrikaner dance form. At twelve she made a clean sweep of several dance competitions on the East Rand, and had her photograph published in the local community newspaper. When Charlize won the Oscar in 2004, a cousin on her mother’s side, Kobus Maritz, a 32-year-old takeaway delivery man from Kimberley, recalled how he and Charlize used to play together on the Therons’ smallholding as children. She had loved riding a motorbike back then and they had fished and played darts. She had been one of those girls who don’t mind getting dirty with the boys – a real little tomboy. (In a scene in North Country she gets to play darts, and even to the untrained eye it is apparent that that arm, wrist and fingers have had years of dart-throwing experience.) She also learned to drive at a young age and became a skilled driver. Years later, while filming The Italian Job, onlookers were gobsmacked at the skilful way in which she handled the Mini Coopers. Charlize herself said in 2000: “I’ve always loved that duality, where you get dirty with the boys and then put on the ballgown and earrings and do the glamorous thing.” In the relative isolation of the plot, she amused herself in and around the house by creating a fantasy world similar to the imagined life of Hollywood that she had come to know from her visits to the Benoni drive-in

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theatre. On Friday nights she and Gerda would go to the drive-in, while Charles preferred the company of his friends. It was on Fridays that the new releases from Hollywood were screened. One of the first films to make a lasting impression on Charlize was Splash, starring Tom Hanks. Later she would take her bike to go and rent videos in Cloverdene Road. Films like Say Anything (1989) and Dirty Dancing (1987), featuring a young Patrick Swayze (with whom she would later co-star in Waking up in Reno), grabbed hold of her fertile imagination. “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1984) changed my life,” is one of her much-publicised quotes. After her role as a female miner in North Country, she was interviewed for GQ in 2008 and specifically mentioned that Meryl Streep’s Kramer vs Kramer (1979) and Silkwood (1983) had impressed her when she was young – both films about strong women who took on the system in spite of heavy opposition. Could it be that Charlize has tried to emulate Meryl Streep in her choice of character roles? About the influence of fantasy in her formative years, she later said: “I had a very active imagination as a child and I loved putting on make-up, costumes and playing characters, or telling a story.” Charlize recalled how she had acted out roles in her favourite films, dressed in her mother’s clothes. “I remember when I saw Splash I felt jealousy, envy and a little bit of a crush – like Tom Hanks is so cute and who’s the blonde and why can’t I be her? So I’d clean out the duck pond and then get in the clean water and play the mermaid I was so jealous of.” About her growing-up years she remarked: “I feel extremely fortunate to have had that innocence of nature as my constant surroundings. I didn’t have computer games or Nintendo. We barely had television. We had TV for three hours a day and it was one channel and that was it. [South Africa got limited TV broadcasts only in 1975.] “I grew up on mythology [about the tokoloshe, for instance] and people telling stories by the fire. Your imagination is all you have. I wasn’t a shy child at all, that was just part of getting through the day as a child. We didn’t have anything, and not because of poverty. I barely had a doll, just because I wasn’t interested. It was all about the mind for me.”

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In 2008 she told a New York Times reporter: “I was usually barefoot in the dirt, no Game Boys, no computers, and we had sanctions, so there were no concerts. You had to entertain yourself.” Did her budding teenage sexuality play any role in her imaginary world? she was asked in 2000. When she kisses famous actors in her films today, does she happen to remember her first kiss? “Sure do. He had braces. We were in the backyard. Anyway, it was after we had just watched Friday the 13th. What a real romance movie! So we were just standing there because it was so planned. Like okay, you’re gonna come over, watch a movie, then we kiss. His name was Nicky. We were standing in the backyard and I’m like, you wanna do it, you wanna do it? Well, okay, then let’s do it. And we were standing there arguing about it for so long, it was just awful. But then it was darkness, saliva and tongue. I was twelve, I think, twelve or thirteen.” Pottie Potgieter, who used to live in Putfontein, remembers the Therons. Charlize was the apple of her dad’s eye, he says, but it was actually her mom who was behind her success. Gerda always groomed and polished Charlize. She was a pretty girl and her mother made sure that people noticed. Another school friend says that she always knew Charlize would go far. She was hardworking. She had the same determination her late father had. During her seven years at primary school she received numerous trophies, medals and other awards for a variety of performing art forms, from ballet and Spanish dance, to singing and acting. Michèle Pöhl-Phillips, Charlize’s dance teacher between the ages of six and thirteen, calls her an exceptional student. She recalls how Charlize was once the loyal swallow in the school’s performance of Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince. In the death scene she was so dramatic that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Gillian Bonegio taught Charlize Spanish dancing, and Charlize would often later refer to her love of the flamenco. Bonegio remembers that Charlize had a wonderful sense of humour, was practical, humble and full of confidence. The moment she appeared on stage, the audience was swept away. It wasn’t just her beauty, but also her grace. She had always been different, older than her years. Always special.

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Once, at the Spanish dance championships, Charlize walked on stage four counts early and when she realised this, improvised a turn and dropped her fan. Bonegio says that she was sitting in the audience wondering what Charlize would do. But she just continued, improvised with her arms, performed the steps and looked absolutely normal. Nothing could put her off. Bernice Lloyd, Charlize’s high-school ballet teacher at Die Kruin High School (later the National School of the Arts) in Johannesburg, recalls how thirteen-year-old Charlize told her schoolfriends that she had been a princess in a previous life. Her classmates – almost all of them children from rural areas – seemed to believe her. Lloyd remarks that it had seemed as if Charlize believed it too . . . One afternoon, she remembers, Charlize was the only one to arrive for her ballet lesson. When she later asked the other girls where they had been, seeing that their parents were paying for the lessons, they replied that, because Charlize used to be a princess, they were her slaves and had to clean her room in the hostel. The children all but worshipped her, Lloyd says. Charlize stood out from the rest. She was determined, above average, and was much taller than the other girls. Her beauty was what you noticed first. She told her ballet teacher that she was going to be very famous one day. Lloyd says that she had thought Charlize would grow up to be a model or a ballerina – not an actress. She would have made a success of any of those careers too, she adds. She was very musical as well. To crown it all, she had a formidable nose for business from an early age. This was evident from the chocolates she bought, and sold at a profit in the hostel. About Charles’s death Lloyd remembers that Charlize didn’t show much emotion on the outside. She was back at school a few days after the incident. “She was able to pick herself up and perform like a true artist.” The former ballet teacher apparently knew Charlize’s parents quite well and she describes Charles and Gerda as a charming couple. Charles was very attractive, she says, and adds (contrary to Charlize’s own memories of her father) that her father always attended school concerts and meetings.

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In 1988, when Charlize was still maintaining that her father had died in a car crash, she spoke to Jamie Diamond of Mademoiselle about her father and her ballet career: “He was around. Sometimes. He never refused me my classes. But he never came to my performances. He was an alcoholic. It wasn’t a good marriage. It was good for me to be at boarding school so I didn’t witness that.” In 1996, in an interview after the release of That Thing You Do! (about American pop culture in the sixties) she spoke about her isolated youth on the plot: “I grew up five years behind everybody else in terms of pop culture. But my mother used to sneak me in under a blanket to the drive-in to see R-rated movies. When I was ten I saw The Shining. When I was thirteen, she gave me the birds-and-the-bees talk, and then we watched Fatal Attraction. She was so cool. Movies were a way for my mom to explain the mysteries of life to me, so I lived my life vicariously through film.” Her so-called handicap as far as pop culture was concerned was one of the strange examples she often used when interviewed during her rise to fame in Hollywood, to portray an image of innocence – artlessness, even. But never naivety. It is hard to believe that a teenager whose mother had taught her life’s lessons at the hand of Dirty Dancing and Fatal Attraction, a confident girl, who entertained shoppers at a mall and her friends at boarding school by playing the guitar and singing, could have been so out of touch with modern pop culture. In the same year (1996) that she made the remark about not being au fait with pop, she attended a Cyndi Lauper concert in Los Angeles and remarked afterwards what a big fan of Lauper’s she had been as a teenager, mentioning that she had once even dyed her hair pink. A high-school friend speaks of the fun they had at boarding school, with Charlize always taking the lead. She would stand on her bed, and while “Black Velvet” (Alannah Myles’ 1990 hit) was playing, she would sing along, make moves and throw candy from her cupboard for them to catch. And she would groan: “Oh, Keanu Reeves, Keanu Reeves . . .”, like any typical standard-seven schoolgirl with a crush on the big actor. Years later the friend watched Sweet November and could hardly believe her eyes . . . there was Charlize, kissing Keanu Reeves!

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Grandmother As a little girl, Charlize was close to her grandmother Bettie. Some time after Charlize’s birth, Bettie remarried and settled in Kuruman in the Northern Cape with her new husband, Christo Moolman, an auto-electrician. She still regularly visited Benoni, where her daughter Elsa and her family had settled on Plot 25 at the corner of Cloverdene Road and Third Road, near Charles and Gerda. After her father’s death, Charlize and her mother refused to have any further contact with Bettie and the rest of the Theron family. Never in any interview did Charlize refer to her grandmother again. It later became clear that Charlize had cut her ties with her grandmother after Bettie had insinuated that Charlize’s behaviour on the evening of her father’s death might indirectly have contributed to the tragedy. But the earlier loving relationship between grandmother and granddaughter (Charlize was Bettie’s first grandchild) is evident from the numerous letters, photographs and small gifts from Charlize to her grandmother. After several conversations with Charlize’s aunt Elsa, I began to get a picture of complex family relationships, especially with Gerda. I also discovered that the Therons were a close-knit family, and that they had all but heroworshipped Charles, who had, as a young boy, helped keep the family together in the absence of a father and who had fulfilled that central role until the time of his death. (I also heard Elsa ending every call from her home in George to her mother, Bettie, in Kuruman with the words: “I love you, Mommy.”) In 2008 I went to Kuruman to visit Bettie Moolman. She and her elderly husband, who was still working at the time, were living in a two-bedroomed flatlet within walking distance of the Dutch Reformed Mother Church, on a property belonging to another granddaughter. An enormous camel thorn tree grows on the pavement in front of the house. We sat on garden chairs under a roofed area at the back door. With her grey-white hair loose on her shoulders, Bettie called for tea and lit a cigarette, not the first one of the morning. She laughed: “The children want me to quit.” Behind Bettie, her garden was a blaze of bright colours. She told me she got up early every morning to tend to her flower beds. On 30 January 2009 she would be seventy-nine, and she had already lost a kidney and part of her colon through cancer.

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I searched her features for a likeness to her beautiful, world-famous granddaughter. There was a marked resemblance around the mouth, but it is difficult to compare faces where there is an age gap of forty-six years. “What colour are Charlize’s eyes really?” I asked. “Some people say they’re blue, others say green, and some say they’re somewhere in-between.” “Grey.” Her answer came without a moment’s hesitation. “Her eyes are exactly the same shade of grey as her father’s. Charlize has Charles’s dreamy eyes, the same sad eyes . . .” She pronounced the name “Charlees”. The tea tray arrived, the cups arranged on the cloth that had covered the top-loader washing machine a moment before. She pointed at the rolled-up doors of the double garage. Inside the garage there were sofas and easy chairs. “We’re turning the garage into a sitting room. The flat is too small. In the garage we’ll have enough seating when the children and grandchildren come to visit.” She poured more tea and lit another cigarette. “But I don’t know if Charlize will ever come from Hollywood to visit us. One of the children said they read somewhere that [Stuart] Townsend wants us to reunite, but apparently Gerda doesn’t approve. That Gerda . . .” A Hollywood star in a garage-cum-sitting room? Bettie got up to show me around the flat. On the walls and tables and cabinets she proudly pointed out photographs of her beautiful daughters and granddaughters. She paused at each picture, telling a little story. A sepia photograph is of her younger sister. “See how beautiful she was,” said Bettie. The Theron women, I thought to myself, are indeed not only strong, but beautiful as well; the good genes that Charlize has inherited are in evidence on both sides of the family, for Gerda is an attractive woman too. Among all the framed photographs it suddenly struck me – not what was there, but what was conspicuous by its absence: Where was Charlize? There was no picture to pay tribute to the famous granddaughter. No public display of the world-renowned Theron offspring. No photograph of Charlize with her Oscar, even though the entire Theron clan had been bursting with pride on the night, together with the rest of South Africa.

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The answer is sad and tinged with irony: thousands of photographs have been taken of Charlize, highlighting every aspect of her career; she even has her own personal photographer. But her grandmother has never received a special photograph of her granddaughter to frame and hang on the wall. She has to share the images of Charlize that appear so regularly in the media with strangers from across the world. The only photographs she has are the ones she once received from a little girl. Back outside, Bettie brought out the special Charlize album and a small red tin box. She might not occupy a place of honour on the wall, but Charlize is cherished in an album and a tin box. From the box Bettie produced a packet of embroidered handkerchiefs that a young Charlize had once given her grandmother as a gift. Lovingly the fingers stroked the handkerchiefs. She put them back and clicked the lid shut. I would have liked to know what was going through her mind at that moment. It was touching to see her silent devotion to a memento that was almost twenty years old. There were also gifts brought back after a holiday in Mauritius. And the letters, together with the photos Charlize had sent her grandmother as a little girl, were all formally arranged in the album. There was Charlize in school uniform, in ballet outfits, with her dog Lulu, a pink bow around its neck. Countless families have albums with similar photographs of little girls, all looking more or less the same. Some smile toothlessly, others are camera shy, some are sulky, others precocious. Charlize looks as if she was born to be in front of the lens; she looks completely at home posing for the camera – a striking, natural beauty. It would not have taken a fortune teller to predict her future. Bettie showed me a head-and-shoulders photograph of Charlize in her primary-school uniform. Her long light-brown hair was caught in two neat pigtails on either side of her head, tied up with elastic bands adorned with bobbles. One bobble was clearly higher than the other, and that in an official school photograph! “When she sent me the photo, I noticed the lopsided bobbles immediately and I phoned to ask why Gerda had fixed the child’s hair so carelessly. Charlize told me her mother had been too busy before school that morning and so her father had brushed her hair and made the pigtails.” Next Bettie showed me a typed letter and told me the story behind it. In 1983 Charles had bought a typewriter to take care of his business corre-

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spondence. Bettie happened to be visiting when Charles brought the typewriter to his office. He asked his mother to see that Charlize, then eight years old, didn’t play with the new typewriter. He was only too familiar with her busy little fingers. But he had scarcely left when grandmother and granddaughter hatched a plot. Charlize just couldn’t keep her hands off those alluring keys, so Grandma rolled a sheet of paper into the machine and stood guard at the door to warn Charlize if her father should approach. Charlize began to type: A puppy oh a puppy I want that he can be on gard at my bed I rite a letter to for a puppy oh a puppy to Chalize t

for chrismas so nite and lie befor father chrismas to ask chase away the krooks

Oh, how she and Charlize had laughed at that letter, Bettie recalled. She had kept the typed letter, dated 4 June 1983 in Bettie’s handwriting, along with all the other letters Charlize had written in her neat, childish hand, lavishly decorated in coloured pencil with brightly coloured flowers and hearts. On 5 December 1984, aged nine, Charlize had written to her grandmother in Kuruman:

Granny I love you very much enjoy yourself in koereman. Love from Charlize On July 17 (the year has been omitted, but by then Charlize was clearly a more skilled writer):

Dear Granny How are you. We are well. I hope you’re not ill. Granny the flu has got me. Granny I’m going to dance again, but this time I’m going to do a tutu dance. My daddy’s beard is very long now and my mommy is letting her hair grow. Granny must write me a letter. Granny I have to say goodbye

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now. Granny I’m sorry that the letter is so short but next time I’ll write a longer letter. Remember I still love you very very much. Regards from Charlize To her own letters to Charlize after Charles’s death, even those sent to an address in Hollywood, Bettie never got any reply. “Things were never the same after that terrible night. I am still grieving for my son. And I grieve for my granddaughter who doesn’t want to know me. I’m glad she’s achieved so much, but I’m very sad that her father isn’t here to witness her success.” Still, she keeps hoping to see her granddaughter again, Bettie said, or at least to hear her voice, because she doesn’t know how many birthdays she has left. “I don’t care whether she’s rich or famous, I just want to see her again.” I took my leave and left her my cigarette lighter; hers had lit its last cigarette. And I couldn’t help thinking what Charlize is missing here at Kuruman, far removed from fame and wealth. How do Hollywood illusions measure up against an album and a tin box filled with genuine love and longing? You can almost picture the scene on the plastic chairs at the back door: grandmother and granddaughter with their heads together, sharing their memories, the sound of Charlize’s famous belly laugh. But when I got into my car, parked under the camel thorn, another image filled my mind, the one on the last photograph in the Charlize album. Slightly macabre, but probably a fitting remembrance of the two loved ones Bettie had lost in a single night: the photograph of Charles in his coffin, his eyes closed as if he were merely sleeping.

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