Charlize: Life's one helluva ride

Charlize – Life’s one helluva ride

Chris Karsten

For Simone

Hero worship is the cornerstone on which Hollywood is built. Yet sometimes a person emerges from this dream factory who is admired for more than fame alone. Charlize Theron is not just another pretty face.

She has an arsenal of words that would make a seasoned sailor blush; in jeans and sneakers, she’ll take on a pub filled with men and beat them at darts, and in her evening gown, she’ll outdo Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher at Hollywood Dominoes. She has a raucous laugh, she’s bold, even cheeky. She’s unpretentious, and in her stilettos she towers unashamedly above the rest of the company. To take her for a dumb blonde would be a mistake: she has ice in her veins. You don’t make a blonde joke in Charlize’s presence without the uneasy feeling that she just might break your neck.

What is the secret that has enabled her to progress from a plot at Putfontein to a place in the pantheon of stars? It was certainly more than mere luck or coincidence. Her stunning looks have been an advantage. But she possesses other remarkable qualities too. She has faith in herself and perseveres in the tireless pursuit of a dream.

As a teenager, she saw the movie Splash, starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah, and was convinced that she could have done a better job of playing the mermaid.

Still, thousands of young girls with similar qualities and dreams arrive in Hollywood every year, and few of them succeed.

In the early nineties the musician and singer Jackson Browne, known for his two hit albums, The Pretender and Running on Empty, was still romantically linked with Daryl Hannah. In Boulevard, he sings about the hope and despair of aspiring young actresses in Hollywood:

Down at the golden cup / They set the young ones up / Under the neon light / Selling day for night / The hearts are hard and the times are tough / Down on the boulevard the night’s enough / Nobody knows you / Nobody owes you nothin’ / Nobody shows you what they’re thinking / Nobody baby . . .

These words did not turn out to be true of the tough Afrikaans-speaking South African girl who arrived in Hollywood in 1993. Just fourteen years later, at the beginning of September 2007, an entire street block on one of those very boulevards that Browne had been singing about was closed off for three days during the filming of Hancock, in which Charlize co-starred with Will Smith. An irate motorist remarked to a reporter: It’s bad enough when there’s a major premiere on Hollywood Boulevard – that snarls up the traffic. But for three days? Not everyone in this town is a tourist or a member of the film industry.

He was probably unaware that the film’s female lead had been discovered on that very same Hollywood Boulevard. Today she’s a member of the A list, has an Oscar on her mantelpiece and an established career as a film maker.

Before the release of Hancock in 2008, she was asked whether the hue and cry of Hollywood didn’t make her yearn for a more carefree lifestyle, like the one she used to enjoy in Benoni.

My life is carefree, was her reply. "When I started acting I had no real training, I had no real knowledge of this industry. I read a lot of biographies of the greats – the Marlon Brandos and James Deans. They were very tortured method actors. I thought that if I want to be really good at that, this is what I had to do. I did it. And I hated it. I had a moment when I said: if this is what it is, I don’t think I can do it. You know, because it becomes too isolated and your life becomes so cold. So I did an experiment. I did a film that was incredibly emotional and I actually had a good time. I made friends and I lived my life and the work was good. I went: Wow, okay! I think, like anything, you have to have discipline. When you work, you work, and when you live life, you live life.

We only get one shot at this. I don’t want to lie on my deathbed and think I screwed that one up. I know for a fact I’m going to lie on that deathbed, whenever that will be, and say: ‘This has been one helluva ride.’

Childhood

Life wasn’t about my mother walking around saying,

Look how beautiful you are. It was about, Did you milk the cow?

Charlize, InStyle, 1998

Pilgrim

Few people are ever completely free of their beginnings, hence the occasional nostalgia for bygone places that fill us with vague, pleasant memories. More often than not we are disappointed when we return, for what awaits us is not always what we have hoped for. In February 1997 Charlize undertook her own pilgrimage to bid farewell to Plot 56, a smallholding at Putfontein, near Benoni in Gauteng. It had been nearly six years since she left the house where she’d been a little princess and where her childhood dreams first took flight. It was also the house where her father had died one terrible winter’s night.

But by 1997 there was hardly any sign left of her innocent childhood world. Only ghosts still frequented the place. It was a sad farewell, but in Hollywood Charlize was the next big thing and the distinction between art and life was growing hazy. Perhaps not in her own mind, but it was evident in many of her shared memories of Putfontein.

During those first delirious Hollywood years Charlize often referred nostalgically to her Afrikaner roots, to cow dung between her toes, her pet goat, the stray animals they tended, and children riding to school on donkeys. But in later years certain things she said sounded almost like an amended version of the near-idyllic pastoral scene she had formerly described.

Still, she had retained her childhood spontaneity, and it stood her in good stead, combined with a healthy dose of obstinacy, essential for survival in Hollywood. After the release of Mighty Joe Young in December 1998, an interview published in the fashion magazine Vogue portrayed her as a combination of girlish innocence, Boer toughness and easygoing sexuality, sort of a South African version of Ava Gardner: "Charlize Theron is a Boer, which in Afrikaans means dwelling on the earth. ‘That is what we were.’"

Her own dwelling on the earth, that particular patch of earth at Putfontein, could hardly be called a farm; it seems rather like a vague, romanticised attempt to mirror the setting of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. However, Charlize can be forgiven for this misrepresentation, for she was a child, living out her fantasies on a smallholding of two hectares, where she really did live close to the earth and animals. And she does indeed stem from generations of boers (farmers) as well as Boers (Boer soldiers), as she correctly maintains in her American interviews.

Today her dwelling is in Hollywood. She no longer lives out her fantasies on two hectares in Benoni; the entire world is her oyster. After her Oscar, a South African columnist wrote that, just as is the case with the angels, Los Angeles owes its existence to the transmission of messages. But where the heavenly angels sing around God’s throne, the angels of Los Angeles have established their own holy order: their messages proclaim their own glory. That is why they have to work so hard at their ephemeral appeal. Whether one’s opinion of Los Angeles is favourable or not, fact remains that it is the first city in the history of the world to owe its status to the undisguised and sustained creation of illusions. Charlize, South Africa’s queen of the silver screen, happens to be an excellent perceiver and interpreter of such illusions.

In August 2008 I paid a visit to Charlize’s new playing fields, Los Angeles, legendary abode of angels, illusions and narcissism. Following her trail when she first arrived in Hollywood, I found myself at 115 South Fairfax Avenue. On a wall is a life-sized image of a country girl in silhouette. It is no illusion; it is real. There she is, a few bus stops south of Hollywood, in one of Tinseltown’s busiest streets that crosses all the world-famous boulevards with their alluring aura of glitz and glamour (Wilshire, Beverly, Santa Monica, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard itself): a girl with braids and a watering can in her hand. Did Charlize feel homesick at the sight of this young girl when she first set foot in this strange town in 1993? Or when she went to the Farmer’s Market diag-onally across Fairfax, where celebrities, without their Guccis and make-up on a Saturday, mingle with ordinary Angelenos amid food stalls and the sounds of jazz and country music?

Charlize has mentioned the convenience of the Farmer’s Market, where she could buy a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for $1.50 before walking until her feet ached, down to the important agencies in Wilshire Boulevard, or up towards Hollywood Boulevard, specifically the section between La Brea and Gower, reminiscent of the myths and legends of Hollywood, where the white Hollywood sign on the hill behind Griffith Park entices and enchants. She was discovered in a bank on Hollywood Boulevard – the stuff fairytales are made of. (The bank has long since been demolished.) On the corner of Hollywood and Vine is a new high-rise complex with upmarket apartments. In due course Charlize would buy an expensive penthouse in the Broadway Hollywood building, with a view of Hollywood Boulevard, just a few hundred metres from her sidewalk star on the Holly-wood Walk of Fame.

The dice have fallen perfectly for Charlize, I thought, my eyes on a waiflike girl of perhaps eleven or twelve – definitely no older than thirteen. She was sitting on a folding chair in front of the Kodak Theatre on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She had long auburn hair and was wearing a red dress, her skinny legs in purple tricots. She was singing to passers-by and tourists, accompanied by a guitarist of fifteen, perhaps sixteen years old. He could have been her brother. Behind them was a small suitcase. On the ground in front of them people threw coins and one-dollar notes.

I remembered that Charlize used to sing in a Benoni shopping mall to earn pocket money, accompanying herself on her guitar. This girl stared at me without a smile or a sign of any emotion at all when I took her picture, as if she were looking right through me. Perhaps her heart was filled with dreams that her name, too, would one day be immortalised on a star alongside those of Charlize and Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry. All those famous names at her feet as she was sitting there. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, this section of the street is also called.

Roots

When referring to Charlize’s ancestry, overseas publications have often mentioned that on her mother’s (Maritz) side she is of German descent and on her father’s (Theron) side of French descent. Charlize is directly descended from the first Huguenots who came to South Africa. In 2004, after she had won the Oscar for Monster, the genealogical department of the Huguenot Memorial Museum in Franschhoek, near Cape Town, published an article about the connection between Charlize and Commandant Danie Theron, famous Boer hero of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). The article caught the attention of members of the American Huguenot Society, who were busy at the time with a series of projects about the French Huguenots’ contribution to American society, especially in the theatre and the arts.

Two years earlier the name Danie Theron had also been in the news worldwide: In 2002, Nelson Mandela unveiled a statue of Danie Theron at the Voortrekker Monument at Fort Schanskop in Pretoria. Having been imprisoned for nearly three decades himself, Mandela, speaking mainly in Afrikaans, paid homage to Theron, who had fought against British imperialism and died for the Afrikaner cause.

The original Theron ancestor is thought to be Jacques Thérond, who was born in Nîmes, Languedoc, France, on 11 May 1668 and died at Drakenstein near Cape Town on 2 December 1739. He was married to Marie Jeanne Du Pré of Béthune in Artois, who died in the Tulbagh district in 1763. Daniel Johannes Stephanus (Danie) Theron was born at Tulbagh on 9 May 1872, the ninth of Willem Wouter Theron’s fifteen children.

Large families were not uncommon among the unsophisticated farmers of the time, and were certainly not restricted to Afrikaners. Charlize’s grandmother Bettie comes from a large family too, and she had six children herself. On her back porch in Kuruman, at the age of 78, she shared with me the secret of the old people’s large families. Everyone went to bed early after a hard day’s honest labour, she said. And they were up before the sun was out. It was customary for the first one awake, usually a child, to wake everyone else in the house before lighting the fire and boiling the water for coffee. It was then, during that short respite before the coffee came, that the chance was grabbed in the main bedroom to extend the family!

The Boer scout Danie Theron qualified first as a teacher and then as a lawyer and opened his own legal practice in Krugersdorp, just west of Johannesburg. He met Hannie Neethling and they became engaged. But in August 1898, Theron was deeply shocked when Hannie died unexpectedly of pneumonia. Some time after her death a rebellious streak, characteristic of the Therons, made the public take notice of Danie.

Six months before the onset of the Anglo-Boer War, in April 1899, W F Moneypenny, fresh from England, had been the editor of The Star in Johannesburg for barely two months. In a climate not at all conducive to good relations between Afrikaner and Brit, Moneypenny deemed it proper to refer scornfully in his newspaper to the ignorant Dutch. Like many Boers of the time, Theron had a short patriotic fuse, and demanded an apology from Moneypenny. When the latter refused, Theron beat him up, shattering his spectacles. On Tuesday, 25 April 1899, Theron appeared in court on a charge of assault. His defence was extreme provocation. He was sentenced to a prison term of two months or a hefty fine of £20, which his supporters at court promptly collected and paid.

Shortly after the war broke out, he established the Theron Verkenningskorps (TVK) – a body of scouts – which concentrated on spying and launching guerilla attacks on the British forces. On 5 September 1900 he was killed in battle in the Gatsrand near Fochville, between Johannesburg and Potchefstroom. His TVK men buried his remains in the Pienaar family graveyard at Elandsfontein, and in 1903 he was reinterred next to his fiancée, Hannie, on the family farm, Eikenhof, beside the Klip River. He had never been married and thus left no direct descendants.

One of his brothers was Charles Jacobus (Charlie) Theron, child number thirteen, who later became a farmer and speculator in Namaqualand, operating as far north as Vioolsdrif on the Orange River, the border between South Africa and Namibia. Charlie named one of his sons Danie, after his brother, the Boer hero.

Namaqualand is a harsh region, named after its indigenous Namaqua-Khoi inhabitants, with place names that speak of a spirited attachment to the soil. Tradition has it that Vioolsdrif got its name from a fiddler simply remembered as Jan Viool.

It is at Springbok, principal town of this arid region (the springbok is also the national animal emblem of South Africa), that Danie Theron of Pofadder married the attractive Bettie Beets of Vioolsdrif on 8 August 1947, at the onset of Namaqualand’s world-renowned wild-flower season. Bettie was only seventeen and already five months pregnant. Their first child, Charles, was born a few months later, on 27 November 1947.

Charles later married Gerda (Maritz) and they had a daughter, Charlize.

The genealogy on the Maritz side is still incomplete and has only been traced back to Gerda’s grandparents, Phillipus Rudolf Maritz and Gerda Jacoba Aletta Kruger of Tsumeb (Namibia). Charlize’s grandfather and grandmother Maritz (Gerda’s parents) were Jacob Johannes Maritz and Johanna Maria Barindina Stofberg. Gerda was born at Prieska in the Northern Cape, one of four children.

Besides Charles, three other children, Hennie, Danie and Elsa, were born out of Danie and Bettie Theron’s union before the marriage began to flounder. The aforementioned rebellious streak aside, the Theron men often came into conflict with their wives about their heavy drinking. The Theron women, on their part, were strong and outspoken, and would not bend the knee to any man.

With her marriage on the rocks, Bettie Theron moved with her three youngest children across the Orange River to the southern region of South-West Africa (currently Namibia), where she met her second husband, Willie Kruger. They had two more daughters, Yvonne and Karen, before he died.

Bettie’s eldest, Charles, stayed behind at boarding school in Springbok when his mother moved to South-West Africa. In his final year at school he was head boy. He was an academic achiever and a good sportsman, but his mother chiefly remembers him as a conscientious and hardworking youngster on his parents’ farm.

In 2008 I called on Bettie at Kuruman and we spoke about her son Charles and her granddaughter Charlize, who has inherited so many of her father’s good qualities. She spoke of the many nights the boy had slept in the orchard, to be ready in the early hours when it was their turn to irrigate from the canal.

After all the years, Bettie still became emotional when mentioning her beloved son, especially when she spoke about the manner of his death. And when she spoke of Charlize, whose name combines those of her grandmother and her father (Charles and Elizabeth) and who has renounced her grandmother, I could see that these so-called strong women actually have soft hearts.

After finishing school, Charles joined his family in South-West Africa. They were now in Otjiwarongo, in the north of the country. In 1968 Charles noticed the pretty Maritz girl. Gerda’s railway-worker father had died in an accident on 9 February 1968, barely ten days after Gerda’s fifteenth birthday. She was in standard eight, and six years Charles’s junior. Her hair was honey-blonde, her skirts short, and everyone knew her as Koot. Later she became known as Gerda and occasionally she called herself Gerta. But as Koot, she lived with her sister, two brothers and her widowed mother, Hannie, in a station house beside the railway line in Otjiwarongo. She excelled at athletics, but the family was poor and there were few opportunities available to her.

In 2004 Charlize lifted the curtain slightly on her mother’s childhood. "She was blonde where her siblings were dark; tall where they were short. And she was not content with the narrow range of options presented to her as the youngest child of the family – to stay at home and take care of her mother. She was very talented. She was a gymnast, good in sports. But it was never encouraged. Many times it was taken away from her. All the other kids left and she had to stay home. At the age of nineteen she rejected this role and left. Years later the days on which she visited her mother were the only ones guaranteed to put her in a bad mood.

I felt the impact of her background in the way she raised me. Everything she didn’t have, she wanted to be able to give me. By 19, when she fucked off, she was like, ‘Now I want all those things I never had in my life.’ (In reality, Gerda did not leave home at nineteen, for at eighteen she was already married to Charles.)

At Otjiwarongo, Charles, an attractive young man, was the de facto breadwinner and caretaker of his widowed mother and five siblings. But Bettie decided to move south, back to Keetmanshoop, where the cost of living was lower and she would be able to afford a large house with enough room for everyone. Gerda, madly in love with Charles, left school, left her mother, Hannie, and her brothers and sister, and moved to Keetmanshoop with the Therons. Charles found her a job as a telephonist with his employer.

For the next two years, Gerda was accepted into the bosom of the Theron family, and Bettie, the matriarch, had her hands full with all the children. Bettie remembers that Gerda, or Gertruida, showed a stubborn streak even then – she wore mini skirts, so shamelessly short that her panties showed at the slightest movement. And her temper! The saying went that she would take out your appendix without an anaesthetic.

Charles was twenty-three when he married Gerda on 29 January 1971, two days after her eighteenth birthday. He was working for a road-construction company at the time, and initially he and Gerda led a nomadic life, staying in caravans on road-construction sites in the Northern Cape. Living in such stark isolation, the roadworkers often found distraction in the bottle. Charlize later maintained that her father had initially stopped drinking after his marriage to her mother, but Gerda seems to be the sole source of this information.

When Charles and Gerda moved to the Witwatersrand, Charles became involved with the rental and management of the heavy equipment used for earthworks and road construction. When his employer sent him to Scotland for a few months to gain experience, the young couple was keen to make use of the opportunity.

By Christmas 1974, after their return to South Africa, Gerda was pregnant. She was twenty-two when their daughter was born on Thursday, 7 August 1975. The delighted father immediately sent a telegram to his mother in the Northern Cape. The telegram, addressed to Bettie Kruger and stamped Birchleigh (a suburb of Kempton Park on the East Rand) announced that a seven-pound daughter had been born and that both mother and daughter were doing well.

Bettie, who still keeps the telegram in an album with many other mementos, photographs and letters from Charlize to her grandmother, thinks that the postal worker who had sent the telegram might have made a mistake when typing seven pounds. According to her, Charlize had been a puny little thing, without a single hair on her head.

But the hairless baby became a beautiful little girl with a soft round head. Her proud father loved to stroke the little head with the palm of his hand. It reminded him of the smooth head of a walking stick, or knob- kerrie, and he gave her the Afrikaans nickname Kieriekoppie. This pet name stuck with her in an abbreviated form, and to friends and family Charlize became Kerrie. Even after the fame brought by the Oscar, the family still speak with warmth and pride of their own little Kerrie who has achieved so much, and her mother still calls her Kerrie in private conversations.

Charlize herself has said that her hair didn’t begin to grow until she was four, about the time that they moved to the plot at Putfontein. As she grew older, Charlize’s baby-blonde hair changed to light brown, its natural colour, as seen in In the Valley of Elah (2007). That’s really me. That’s my natural hair colour. That’s me with very little make-up. That’s what I look like, she told an Irish reporter in 2008.

Shortly after Charlize’s birth, Charles was presented with a chance to start his own business. As always before making any important decisions, he turned to his mother in Kuruman for advice. He hesitated about taking such a big step, for there was now a child in their home in Farrarmere, Benoni. But he could get a contract for earthmoving work at Bapsfontein, and a second bond on their home would enable him to acquire his first machinery. He discussed it with Gerda too and decided to take the plunge. (In later interviews, Charlize often uses the metaphor of swimming or drowning to describe her own journey through life.)

It was a sound decision by Charles. At his death scarcely twelve years later, the somewhat exaggerated claim was made that Charles Theron owned more road-construction equipment than the Transvaal Provincial Administration.

In 1980 Charles bought a plot of 2,237 hectares at the Rynfield agri-cultural smallholdings, also known as Putfontein, where there was enough space for his growing business. On Plot 56 in Seventh Road, Cloverdene, about 14 km from Benoni, east of Johannesburg, Charles and Gerda began to rent out construction machinery, and they registered the companies G & C Construction and G & C Plant Hire. It was a rural neighbourhood, and the plot was big enough to park the large vehicles, to accommodate the operators, and to keep a few cows and dogs. The industrialisation of the Witwatersrand had already caught up with this outlying plot area, so that it was ideal for running a business, with easy access to the main routes to the East Rand with its adjoining industrial and mining centres, such as Benoni, Boksburg, Brakpan, Germiston and Springs – all the way to Johannesburg.

These cities that have mushroomed around Johannesburg, and also those to the west, are included in the name Witwatersrand, where the world’s richest gold veins were discovered in the nineteenth century and are still being mined. A visitor is greeted by the sight of mine dumps, shafts and smokestacks that extend far past Putfontein – a slightly different picture from the one sketched in an interview Charlize gave Tatler in 2000: She grew up half a world away [from Los Angeles] on an isolated farm near a small town called Benoni, about an hour’s drive through the bush from Johannesburg.

It is this kind of reference to Charlize’s rural background that fascinates Europeans and Americans and surrounds this star from Africa, who began to make a name for herself in Hollywood in the mid-nineties, with an almost exotic aura. And Charlize was clearly reluctant to set the record straight. She has an intuitive understanding of the industry. Not only does she have a love affair with the camera, but she also has a remarkable appreciation of how minds work behind the scenes. She knows the value of perception and image, and what could be more alluring to Hollywood than a breathtakingly beautiful farm girl from Africa?

The Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, who won two Oscars despite his outspoken cynicism about the film industry, wrote in his autobiography, A Child of the Century, that fame in Hollywood can be kept alive simply by employing a good publicity agent. Charlize understands this and pushes all the right buttons – relentlessly, some people say. For this she commands the respect of the Hollywood bigwigs, for they themselves are relentless.

The years following their baby daughter’s birth were difficult for Charles and Gerda. They worked hard at their new business, but Charles had a passion for work that had already distinguished him as a schoolboy. Gerda was a hard worker too, even though her time was now divided between work and the baby. Within a few years she and Charles began to reap the benefits.

Charles was proud of his pretty wife and daughter, but even before their wedding people had wondered whether their divergent temperaments would be reconcilable. Charles was sociable and warm, he loved company, and everyone was welcome in his house and at his bar, his sister, Elsa, told me. It was the place where friends and family gathered to laugh and chat and have a good time. Gerda was more private, to the point of appearing unfriendly and sullen when her house was invaded by guests. And she had a sharp tongue. Her husband’s jovial nature and his drinking with his buddies irritated her. The clash of their personalities led to arguments, and when he came home late, she would sometimes lock the doors so that he was forced to sleep outside in the caravan.

As far as Charlize’s upbringing was concerned, it was chiefly Gerda who took charge of parental discipline, who plied the hairbrush or the shoe when it was necessary to bend the twig in the right direction. Charlize later mentioned that Gerda had once even grabbed a clothes hanger to spank her with. Her aunt, Elsa Malan, remembers how she once intervened when Gerda had wanted to give Charlize a hiding for neglecting to put conditioner on her hair after spending hours in the pool. Gerda was upset because the child’s beautiful long hair might have been damaged by the sun and the chemicals.

About her mother’s discipline Charlize has said: "I got spanked hard on the butt. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. My mother disciplined me. It couldn’t happen in America today, because she’d be put in jail, and to me that’s a very sad thing, because I always deserved it. Never once did I go, ‘God, this is so unfair’. Afterwards I would go up to her and apologize, because I knew that I had been wrong.

She’d hit me with anything that was around: a hairbrush, a shoe – the shoe was a big one. Once I was spanked because I was rude to an older woman in a store. On another occasion I went to school with imprints of Disney cartoons all over my thigh from a hanger that she had grabbed that had all these cutouts on them. I had disobeyed her by eating a bowl of tomato soup while still wearing my school uniform and spilling the soup on my uniform. I deserved that one because that was very disrespectful. She did all the washing and laundry and cooking; she ran the house while running the business. I completely understand. I have to be respectful. I am not washing the clothes, she’s washing them.

Charles sometimes raised his voice in an effort to teach Charlize manners, but raising his voice was about all he could manage. He was wary of Gerda’s short temper, and tried to curry favour when he got into her bad books, which was often, for he was no angel. But Charlize was the apple of Charles’s eye. She was pretty and talented, and he liked to show her off. He would urge her to sing when the family were visiting, and she would pick up the guitar and sing and dance.

She was born for the limelight. In an interview with the Afrikaans magazine Huisgenoot, Gerda remembers how Charlize used to take her guitar to school to entertain the other children when she was in the first grade. At twelve she played the guitar in a shopping mall in Benoni and on a good day she would earn R50 in pocket money.

Tomboy

On the smallholding Charlize developed into a pretty little toddler. At the age of six, she was already showing a love and an aptitude for dance, and she was taken to her first dance lesson. In 1997, during the first wave of interviews after the release of her first two films, 2 Days in the Valley and That Thing You Do!, she said that ballet had been her substitute for the movies. When she danced, she imagined that she was a princess or a fairy. In that way she had always acted in her own little movies, she said.

After the release of these films, there was an almost insatiable demand to talk to this ravishing young beauty from Africa, to ask her opinions about everything under the sun. Her face and body sold magazines from Turkey to Sweden, from Hungary to Australia, and her publicity footwork was nimble and spontaneous, her sensuality fresh yet restrained. She knew the game: the secret not to reveal everything at once, to tease.

In an interview in 1998 she remembers her growing-up years: It was the kind of village where kids rode donkeys to school. My best friend was my pet goat named Bok. I was the kind of child who had incredible dreams. I’d want to be a guitar player and a dancer and always my mother would try to accommodate those dreams.

In another interview she says: I didn’t grow up wealthy, but every dream I had, even if it was crazy, my mother took seriously. If one week I said I wanted to be a classical guitar player, somehow I ended up getting guitar lessons. If I said, ‘Mom, I want to paint,’ she’d say, ‘Okay – art classes.’ When I wanted to perform, she’d pull all the men out of a business meeting and make them sit in the living room where I’d lip-synch and dance in her outfits and shoes. That’s how I grew up. Whenever people were around, it was: Entertain!

Charlize began her school career at the Putfontein Primary School, about three kilometres from their plot in Seventh Road. As befits a conservative Afrikaans community, the Dutch Reformed Church of the Benoni East congregation was next-door to the school and they shared the enormous shade trees in Church Street.

It was a place where children went to school in bare feet. Did they really ride to school on donkeys? Well, perhaps, but I doubt it. In 2008 I heard a story that Charlize had driven to school in an electric golf cart, or, alternatively, a beach buggy. The golf cart is possible, for her father spoilt her rotten. But the donkeys, I suspect, were invented later as part of a fictional supporting cast in this small