Charlize Central

Charlize Theron was straightforward and somewhat philosophical about Hollywood after she accepted the Hasty Pudding’s Woman of the Year award last month.

“You can’t take this industry too seriously,” she said. “We want to believe we’re curing cancer, but we really aren’t.”

She’s like that. Direct. Theron, pronounced “Troon” with a rolled “r” in her native Afrikaans, is out publicizing her new movie, “Sleepwalking,” a grim indie about a wreck of a family that opens in some cities Friday. It is set to open in Tucson March 28.

The woman is a serious actor and a strong feminist, but you can’t reach any of that until you’ve confronted her implacable beauty. She’s an honest 5 feet 11 inches, and rather than wearing low pumps to minimize her height, she sports gray stiletto heels that match skin-tight gray pants and an elegant gray shawl.
Theron’s looks are never far from any discussion of her work. To some, she has willfully chosen parts that nullify her beauty. “So much has been made of the physical transformation in ‘Monster,’ ” she says about the 2003 movie that earned her a best-actress Oscar.

Then came her role as Josey in “North Country,” another unglamorous part, this time a miner. She took a year off to grow her hair back to its natural brown for “In the Valley of Elah,” another unglamorous role as a detective who’s a single mother.

Theron moves seamlessly from tales of boilermakers to discourse on women in film. She chafes at the bipolar Hollywood attitude about women. “If we’re going to tell stories about women, we should do it truthfully,” she says. “We can’t keep living this madonna-whore complex. I think women are way more conflicted than men, and yet somehow we only portray men that way. . . .

“People say Joleen (her character in “Sleepwalking”) is not a really good mother and I say, yeah, that’s the point. You want to tell me every mother out there is a good mother?”

“Sleepwalking” is classic Theron when it comes to messed-up women. Joleen is a disaster of a mother who abandons her child and takes off with a trucker. Her younger brother, a sweet failure of a man, cares for the child as best he can, which is not well.

Her brother eventually returns to their abusive father, played by a terrifying Dennis Hopper, and the farm on which he and his sister grew up, where things get worse. You want to talk darkness, this is your picture.
Theron is also one of the rare Hollywood actors who likes producing. Many direct, an exercise Robert Redford once called “agony and math,” but have no interest in running the whole show.

What she really likes about producing, she says, is the pressure involved.

“It’s about responsibility,” she says. “I like having the responsibility of taking someone’s money and saying I’m going to do good on that.

“It’s another way for me to feel just as satisfied as when I’m in front of a camera, particularly given what’s happening to independent films today, and finding new talent, pulling the circus together and doing it.”
Moviegoers may forget that she was a producer of “Monster.” She’s also a producer of “Sleepwalking,” and an executive producer of the upcoming “The Burning Plain,” directed by Guillermo Arriaga. She’ll produce and star in a remake of “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance,” the final installment of a mondo-violent trilogy by Korean director Chan-wook Park.

In the meantime, she’ll start shooting next month for “The Road,” taken from the Cormac McCarthy masterpiece of the same name, in which she’ll work with Viggo Mortensen.

Her mother, Gerda, remains an anchor in her life. The elder Theron lives a few blocks from her daughter in Los Angeles, and Charlize brought her to the Academy Awards the year she won her Oscar. They’ve been through a lot together since her mother, claiming fear for the lives of herself and her daughter, shot and killed Charlize’s father in 1991. South African authorities did not prosecute.

Theron has been with Irish actor Stuart Townsend for seven years. They fly under the media radar and travel quietly together all over the world whenever she gets a break. And that’s really what she’s most proud of. Her life.

“I’m really proud that I’ve been able to hang on to my life, and do the work I really want to do,” she says. “I think you can have a great career and do great work, but at the end of the day if you don’t have a life to really celebrate that in, it’s a pretty lonely place.”

Source: azstarnet.com