Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron is a South African-American actress and producer whose three-decade career has produced multiple defining American film roles — particularly her 2004 Best Actress Academy Award win for Patty Jenkins's Monster. She was born Charlize Theron on August 7, 1975, in Benoni, South Africa, into an Afrikaner working-class family. Her father Charles Jacobus Theron was a Benoni-area road-construction-business operator, and her mother Gerda Theron was a homemaker. The June 21, 1991 sudden death of her father — when her mother shot him in self-defense after his attempted murder of both her mother and Charlize during a domestic-abuse incident — shaped her early-life biographical narrative.

Her teenage modeling career across 1991–1994 — across her 1991 first commercial-modeling-competition victory at age 16 (which won her a one-year modeling contract in Milan, Italy) — preceded her 1994 emigration to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Her 1995 first feature-film appearance in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (in an uncredited role) and her subsequent 1996 first credited feature-film appearance as a hitwoman in 2 Days in the Valley launched her early-career American film public profile.

Her subsequent late-1990s American film career has produced multiple American films — particularly Lasse Hallström's The Cider House Rules (1999), Hans Petter Moland's The Yards (2000), and Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001).

Her 2003 lead role as Florida-prison-execution-row inmate Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins's Monster (the biographical drama based on the real-life late-1980s Florida serial-killer Aileen Wuornos) — for which Theron gained 30 pounds and altered her appearance — won her the 2004 Best Actress Academy Award at age 28.

Her subsequent feature-film career has produced multiple defining American films — particularly Niki Caro's North Country (2005, earning her the 2006 Best Actress Academy Award nomination), Jason Reitman's Young Adult (2011), George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, opposite Tom Hardy), Atomic Blonde (2017), David Leitch's Bombshell (2019, in which she played Megyn Kelly — earning her the 2020 Best Actress Academy Award nomination), and her 2024 lead role on the Netflix TV series The Old Guard 2. She has been continuously single across her career, although she has two adopted daughters.

Her name Charlize derives from the Afrikaans feminine form of Charles (from the Old Germanic karl meaning "free man"). Charlize has been climbing in American naming since the 2000s.