Charlize Theron, the brilliant Hollywood actress who has won almost all popular international awards including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award celebrates her birthday today. Also known for producing multiple movies under her company’s banner Denver and Delilah Productions, Charlize has also starred in a few of them such as Dark Places, Long Shot, and The Burning Plain.
Although Charlize Theron today is one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, things were not easy when she started her journey. Rather the beautiful actor had a very simple childhood and a secret that she kept hidden for a very long time.
Raised on farm, her mother killed her father for self-defense
The defiant, bold, and beautiful Charlize seem to look like royalty. But in reality, she comes from a very humble family and spent most of her childhood on a farm at Benoni in then Transvaal Province owned by her parents. She was the only child and is an Afrikaner with Dutch, French, and German ancestry.
Her father was an alcoholic and once when Charlize was 15 in a drunken state he threatened both his wife and daughter with a gun. Her mother just grabbed the gun from his hand and shot him dead. The court decided that it was an act of self-defense and hence mom of Charlize did not face any charges.
But the entire incident was so deeply etched in the mind of young Charlize Theron that she never found the guts to talk about it. She was even afraid that people will call her mother a killer of her dad and hence whenever anyone enquired about her father, she said that he died in a car accident. However, now she has accepted the truth in the open and is rather proud of her mother.
Shifted to Milan, started young as a model
Within a year of losing her father, Charlize’s mother shifted to Milan in Italy and there she started working as a model at the young age of 16. The mother-daughter duo later on went to the US where the budding actress worked as a model in New York, and Miami.
While she got her US citizenship at the age of 32, she has retained her South African citizenship as well.