Charlize. Chris Karsten
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 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 diag-onally across Fairfax, where celebrities, without their Guccis and make-up 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 Holly-wood 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.
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!
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 Namaqua-Khoi 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.
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,