Tipped to play Marilyn Monroe in a forthcoming movie, you’d be forgiven for thinking that stunning actress Charlize Theron is all style and no substance. But, Darryl Smith discovers, there’s much more to her than meets the eye.

WHEN you look as good as Charlize Theron you can afford to have a few ‘dress-down’ days — but she’s making a career out it.

The strikingly beautiful South African actress won the Best Actress Oscar in 2004 for her role as real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, a role for which she put on 30 lbs, a wig, false teeth and freckles.

Such was her transformation to play the character that when she walked up on stage to receive the Academy Award having returned to her usual platinum blonde locks and tiny dress size — a pale silver slinky beaded gown from Gucci — the uninitiated may have thought she was collecting the award on someone else’s behalf.

The former fashion model was at it again at the start of this year, portraying Josey Aimes in North Country, a single mother who got a job in the male-dominated iron mines of Minnesota and led America’s first-ever class action lawsuit for sexual harassment.

Another Oscar nomination was forthcoming and although the award eventually went to Reese Witherspoon, Charlize had proved that the beauty of her talent was far from skin deep. 

Sitting opposite me in a top floor suite of London’s Dorchester Hotel, Charlize explains the reasoning behind her choice of gritty roles.

“I think we’ve taken a short vacation from what actors are supposed to do,” she says. “We’ve been so bombarded with the celebrity of it all, the gossip magazines and wanting to know everything about them, there’s this unrealistic image about actors and the way they look.

“That has nothing to do with what you should be doing when you go to work. Actors are only there to service the story. It has nothing to do with Charlize and the way she looks. I think actors who go to it from that ego standpoint and make it about themselves ruin it for those who go and do the job, which is to tell the story.”

The statuesque 30-year-old cuts an all-round impressive figure with her down-to-earth views and passion for her subject, some of which can be attributed to her difficult upbringing on a farm in Benoni outside of Johannesburg, the only child of a German mother and French father.

Charlize believes that the remoteness of her childhood gave her a different take on fame.

“I grew up in a town where we didn’t have magazines or television so when I fell in love with films I was loving Goldie Hawn and Tom Hanks’ films before I even knew what their names were. So I never knew about the celebrity aspect of it, and when I came to America I was quite taken aback by it because I didn’t grow up with that at all. I just thought actors had such a cool job, to go out and play in the backyard and pretend is just like a fantasy.

“The celebrity is not why I wanted to be in this business so I attach no importance to it. If that’s why you wake up in the morning and get out of bed you’re going to crash really hard. I’m not saying I don’t like dressing up, looking nice and having my picture taken — I’m a girl, right? But there’s a time and a place for everything. 

“I don’t look like this when I’m at home. I don’t have three people curling my hair and putting £400-worth of make-up on me. A lot of times I wish the work would just stand up for itself without the celebrity aspect to it.”

Charlize’s childhood came to a tragic and abrupt end when she was 15. Her drunken, abusive father attacked her mother who shot and killed him claiming self-defence. No charges were ever brought against her.

The teenage Charlize moved to Europe soon after the incident and started modelling, moving on to New York a year later where she returned to one of her early loves, dancing, and gaining a place at the Joffrey Ballet.

A knee injury put paid to her dancing career before she was 18 so her mother paid for a one-way ticket to Los Angeles and told her daughter not to return until she was an actress.

This was a long shot as she still had a thick Afrikaans accent at the time. But when she created a scene in a bank over their failure to cash a $500 cheque her mother had sent her, Charlize was, somewhat improbably, handed a card by a casting agent and told to come and see him.

Learning to adopt the language by watching soap operas on daytime television, she landed her first role a year later as Helga in the movie Two Days In The Valley.

“At first I found it really hard using three different English accents — South African, faking the American and faking the accent required by the job. I decided to make it easier for myself and just do one. I haven’t lost my culture, just my accent,” Charlize explains.

“America is not so different, anyway. When I was working in Minnesota on North Country I thought it was like the little community where I was raised. It’s a harsh landscape and people don’t have the luxury of sitting on the couch crying and feeling sorry for themselves. The survival stakes are a lot higher and I have a great respect for those kind of people who wake up in the morning and go and do what they need to do in order to survive. 

“I was raised in a mining community as well, so it was a world that was very similar even though it was minus 40 in Minnesota — I wasn’t used to that!

“What really appealed to me about the story, though, was the incredible group of women it was about. They were so open and honest with us, telling us things about the treatment they’d received in the mine that not even their own families knew, and that makes you want to do the story justice.”

She continues, “I feel incredibly fortunate that I’ve never had to face that in my life and I think that was one of the things that shocked me about this story because when you live in luxury and have choices, and don’t feel like you’ve ever been discriminated against because of your sex, you tend to forget that in this day and age that’s still happening for women. It was only settled in 1998 and it was the first ever sexual harassment class action suit in America, so it’s all fairly recent. 

“I feel passionate about women’s issues, it’s about time we had a female president. I don’t think we’re that far away but it should have happened already. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hillary Clinton runs. I really admire her. I don’t want to run for office but I want to help make a difference. I started the first anti-rape campaign in South Africa nine years ago when rape was a really big problem there.

“Our government refused to play the advertisements so we had to go to court and fight them on it. We won, they played the adverts and the numbers have subsequently dropped.”

When she speaks in those terms, and with her experience of her parents’ violent relationship, it’s no surprise to find that Charlize is no advocate of marriage. She’s dated Irish actor Stuart Townsend for five years but says she has no plans to have a wedding day anytime soon, although she would like to have children.

“I’m happy for people who want to get married but it’s not my thing. I love experiencing life and I’m so incredibly blessed. My mother lives two minutes away from me, I’ve got an incredible partner in crime who likes very similar things to me and there’s nothing better then doing a good job on film and then packing a bag and going off travelling and seeing the world.”