Charlize Theron at 50: The Hollywood star who escaped tragedy to break down prejudices

Placing the origins of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the most precarious starting point possible is a cliché as old as the Mecca of cinema itself. Sylvester Stallone being forced to sell his dog to buy some food, Jennifer Lopez sleeping in the dance school she attended, and Hilary Swank and Jim Carrey converting their cars into makeshift homes are some of the most memorable cases. But the American dream often requires one to begin the journey with literally nowhere to fall asleep, and Charlize Theron ticks every single one of the mythical boxes.

The South African actress, who turns 50 on August 7, is one of the essential performers of the 21st century, who arrived in Los Angeles with a past marked by trauma, a cloth suitcase so worn it relied on buckles to keep it from overflowing, and just enough money to take a cab from the airport and ask the driver to drop her off at the cheapest motel he could find. “I had nothing. I lived day to day. I even had to steal bread from a restaurant once,” she would later confess. Three decades later, with an Oscar under her belt and an estimated fortune of $200 million, Theron marks her 50th birthday as the living embodiment of the American dream and, perhaps, also of its most defiant side.

In an ecosystem where praise is jealously guarded, she has achieved something rare: the generous recognition of those who share the screen with her. “She’s not only a great actress, she’s also a great leader,” said Uma Thurman, with whom she worked on The Old Guard 2 (2025). “She’s strong, noble, dignified, upright, and as smart as they come,” added Chris Hemsworth, who starred alongside Theron in The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016). Seth Rogen, displaying his trademark humor, admitted that he “felt intimidated” working alongside her on Long Shot (2019): “Not only because of how talented she is, but because she kills people in every movie she releases.”

Since her debut almost 30 years ago, directed in That Thing You Do! (1996) by Tom Hanks, who, in addition to being her professional godfather, Theron describes as a “hero and platonic love,” the actress has managed to maintain her status as a major film star with a unique, unorthodox, and influential career.

Far from becoming stuck in her early Oscar win for her transformation into a serial killer in Monster (2003) or limiting herself to capitalizing on the role of the attractive woman — she is one of the most popular Martini girls in history and for decades has been featured on television and in magazines as the image of Dior’s J’adore perfume — she cultivated her chameleon-like talent in all kinds of genres, defying those who claimed that she was “too pretty” to bring great dramatic characters to life. She was one of the first stars of her generation to also work as a producer (series such as the prestigious Mindhunter (2017-2019) bear her signature), she broke down the prejudice that female leads couldn’t carry action films with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Atomic Blonde (2017), and denounced the discriminatory canons of the sector by revealing that, at 40, she was offered the role of Wonder Woman’s mother in the 2017 film of the same name, when she is only 10 years older than Gal Gadot, the film’s protagonist. “This is a great example of how Hollywood slaps you in the face when you start aging,” she said in 2019 on the show Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.

Born and raised on a farm in South Africa during the apartheid years, Theron left the country in 1991 after winning a modeling contest that included a trip to Italy and a contract as a model. She had never flown before, and due to South Africa’s cultural boycott, she couldn’t even watch Hollywood movies. She had just turned 16 and, a few weeks earlier, had faced the trauma that would define her life: the murder of her abusive, alcoholic father at the hands of her mother, Gerda. “My father was so drunk that he shouldn’t have been able to walk when he came into the house with a gun [...] my mom and I were in my bedroom leaning against the door because he was trying to push through the door. And he took a step back and just shot through the door three times. None of those bullets ever hit us, which is just a miracle. But in self-defense, she ended the threat,” she recalled in July 2020 on NPR. Gerda was exonerated of all charges by the courts, and she now lives with her daughter in Los Angeles, the city where she moved in 1994.

After modeling for a year in Milan, she moved to New York in pursuit of her dream of becoming a professional dancer, but a knee injury cut her career short. Broken emotionally and financially, she crossed the country looking for work as an actress with few expectations. “I never thought I’d be very successful as an actress; I just wanted to make a living,” she once recounted. She was to be proven wrong. One morning, desperate because she had no savings and no place to sleep, she begged a bank employee on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles to accept a check, but he refused to cash it because it was issued in another state. Her anguish was so visible that a man waiting in line approached, intervened to help her, and ended up handing her his card. It was John Crosby, manager of actors such as John Hurt and Rene Russo, who, impressed by her beauty and visceral nature, saw in her a diamond in the rough.

A few months later, she made her big screen debut in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995), and from there began to establish herself as one of the most beloved figures of her generation. “She tells you many profound things about the character she brings to life with her eyes, her gestures, her sober and nuanced feelings, her voice and her tone. I would recognize Charlize Theron even if she came out dressed as King Kong. That’s the way love comes to life,” wrote Carlos Boyero in a 2018 review for EL PAÍS about the actress’s performance in the film Tully.

The romance she maintains with the audience and critics is the only one that remains current in Theron’s life. Her first known relationship was with musician Stephan Jenkins, vocalist of the band Third Eye Blind, followed by an intense nine-year courtship with fellow actor Stuart Townsend, which ended in 2010. This was followed by a brief love affair with Keanu Reeves and two years of a high-profile relationship with fellow Oscar winner Sean Penn, which, despite wedding rumors and passionate public declarations — “he is the love of my life,” she once said — ended in 2015. Since then, the actress has not been known to have a partner, and she claimed to be single by choice last July on the podcast Call Her Daddy. In her conversation with Alex Cooper, she also boasted about having had an “incredible” one-night stand with a 26-year-old man.

Theron is the mother of two daughters: Jackson, who is transgender, and August, adopted in 2015 and 2012, respectively. In addition to chronicling her struggle as a mother against transphobia and becoming a powerful ally for the LGBTQ+ community, she is a staunch defender of the #MeToo movement, a United Nations Messenger of Peace, and the founder of the Africa Outreach Project, with nearly 20 years of experience fighting HIV in her native continent.

In a speech during her charity’s gala on June 28, Theron didn’t hesitate to attack figures like Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos, asserting that the world was “going backward rapidly.” “Immigration policy has destroyed the lives of families, not criminals; women’s rights are becoming increasingly uncommon; the lives of queer and trans people are increasingly being erased; and gender-based violence is on the rise. This isn’t just a political issue, it’s a personal one,” she concluded.

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