Charlize Theron

Actor

Born in South Africa, Charlize Theron was a ballerina and model before getting attention as an actress in the Tom Hanks film That Thing You Do (1996) and the Woody Allen film Celebrity (1998). She played a New England ingenue in the 1999 art house hit The Cider House Rules, and by the year 2000 she was starring in big budget pictures like Reindeer Games (with Ben Affleck) and Robert Redford's The Legend of Bagger Vance (alongside stars Matt Damon and Will Smith). What made her a star was her transformation from offscreen beauty to onscreen nightmare as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003, co-starring Christina Ricci). She won an Oscar for best actress and was launched into the top tier of leading ladies. She won another Oscar nomination for North Country (2005), but the highly-anticipated Aeon Flux (2005) was raspberried by the critics and spurned by moviegoers. Her other films include The Italian Job (2003, starring Mark Wahlberg), the HBO movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004, she plays Britt Ekland) and the 2007 Paul Haggis film In the Valley of Elah (starring Tommy Lee Jones).

Extra credit: Theron was nearly cast to play Nomi, the role later taken by Elizabeth Berkley in the ill-fated movie Showgirls... The gossip sheets like to make hay out of the fact that Theron's mom shot and killed her dad back in 1991; the official story is that the dad was abusive and the mom was never prosecuted... Aeon Flux was a cartoon character from the early 1990s, created by Peter Chung.

Others born in South Africa include author J.R.R. Tolkien, surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard, political leader Nelson Mandela and tennis star Amanda Coetzer.

Theron joins actress Neve Campbell in our loop on Ballet Castaways.

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