Charlize. Chris Karsten

Charlize

Charlize - Chris Karsten

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      Charlize – Life’s one helluva ride

      Chris Karsten

      For Simone

       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:

       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.’”

      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 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

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