In her Oscar-winning role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos, Charlize Theron's acting is so good you hardly notice the physical transformation, writes Michael Dwyer.
Sitting by the window of her London hotel last Wednesday, and bathed in the afternoon sunlight, Charlize Theron, the South African former model who won this year's Oscar for best actress, looks radiantly beautiful. She is not remotely recognisable from her appearance in her award-winning portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, for which she underwent a physical transformation as radical as those undertaken by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot.
She gained two stone to play the part. Two sets of prosthetic teeth were constructed for her; one pair for long shots and one for close-ups. Gelatine was applied to her eyelids, causing them to droop and making her look tired.
About half of her eyebrows were removed and the remainder bleached. Make-up effects were employed to disguise her creamy complexion with red tones, freckling, and sun damage. Finally, a hairstylist spent hours stripping her hair of all its life.
Crucially, however, Theron achieved far more than this elaborate physical transformation in the film, immersing herself in the role to the point where her radically altered appearance becomes an afterthought. Her intensely persuasive performance inhabits the personality of Wuornos in all its complexity, vividly capturing her confused mess of emotions - tenderness, vulnerability, desperation, rage and callousness.
That performance has drawn the highest of praise from documentary maker Nick Broomfield, the director of two films about Aileen Wuornos, who was convicted of killing six men and executed two years ago in Florida - the 1992 documentary, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and the recent Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.
"I was reluctant to watch Monster," Broomfield wrote in the Guardian, "fearing that Theron's portrayal of Aileen might be a pale imitation of someone I had known for more than 10 years, but in fact she fully understood Wuornos, her mood swings, her facial gestures, the way she talked, moved, her inner emotional complexity. At times I actually thought I was watching Wuornos." Theron doubled as a producer on Monster, a small-budget film written and directed by Patty Jenkins, and she says she was acutely aware of her responsibility in portraying a real-life person. "It was huge. You have to do it in a way that you can walk away from it and have a clear conscience.
"No matter what she had done in her life, it's still her life, and that's what drove Patty and me to make sure we went after the truth.
"A lot of the time that was hard because you have people telling you it's a movie, it's not a documentary. But the truth of her story was so incredible that all we had to do was tell it truthfully and not embellish it for the sake of a more exciting movie. Nobody really knew what we were doing. We did it all very secretively. When the film was announced, Hollywood was very negative - producers and agents - and the press killed us. Patty and I just had to not listen to what was being said."
Being a producer on the film helped Theron to switch off from such an emotionally raw portrayal at the end of a day's shooting, she says. "We'd always get together the night before and plan the next day out in detail because we only had 28 days to shoot. When I started out in this business, I heard so much about actors staying in character and I assumed that's how you deliver good work. I did that for the first couple of years and I destroyed myself. I had no life. I felt there had to be a way of doing this and actually having a life as well. I realised that the answer was discipline.
"At the end of the shoot, it was the saddest farewell. Our crew was a very small group of amazingly talented people, all of whom worked on the film because they believed in it. Normally, at the end of a shoot everyone's packed up and ready to go home. On the last day we shot all night until the sun came up and it was over. All these macho guys in the crew were crying and Patty was a mess and so was I. It was really sad because we had an incredible shoot."
The film does not dwell on one of the most controversial aspects of the Wuornos case, that somebody so clearly mentally unstable was deemed fit for execution in Florida. "It would have been impossible to cover all the aspects of her life in a single movie," Theron says. "I think you could have made many different movies from her story. You could have told the story of her horrific childhood or her prison years. So many people, especially in America, knew all the courtroom stories because they had seen it on TV.
"I think the way we tell her story makes it clear that while a lot of people thought she was bad from the beginning, she was not someone who started off bad. They went through these circumstances in their lives until they cross a line and they do bad things, but you have to see how that happens. I know Nick Broomfield and I knew he was making a second documentary about her and that it would raise all those questions about her state of mind and whether she should have been executed."
Coincidentally, February 29th, the night Theron received her Oscar for Monster, happens to be the birth date of Aileen Wuornos, but the actress did not mention her in her acceptance speech. "A lot of people said that, and I knew they would, as if they thought I didn't know it was her birthday.
"Before we went to the Oscars, Patty came over and we opened a bottle of champagne and had a toast to Aileen on her birthday. It was very emotional for all of us. I'm so proud of the film and of the fact that we have taken her life and shed light on it.
"There's also a lot of other people to respect in this situation - her victims and the victims' families - so if I'm saying something about Aileen, I felt I should say something about them as well. You only get 45 seconds to make your acceptance speech and this guy is waving his arms at you to finish up. Aileen was such a complex person that you can't just make some very brief comment about her and not be misinterpreted. There's also the fact that the movie speaks for itself. It doesn't hit you over the head or try to manipulate you in any way. It's just the truth about who she is and I sleep peacefully at night knowing that we treated her - and everyone else who was involved - with integrity."
When she was 15, Theron underwent a traumatic personal experience when her mother shot and killed her estranged husband in their native South Africa. The authorities ruled that it was justifiable homicide in self-defence, and the case never went to trial. It is a subject that Charlize Theron is unwilling to discuss in media interviews.
She grew up in Benoni outside Johannesburg and studied ballet and worked as a model before turning to acting, making an eye-catching debut in the low-budget 2 Days in the Valley, the first of two dozen movies she has made in the past eight years. Her notable credits include That Thing You Do, directed by Tom Hanks; Devil's Advocate with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves; Lasse Hallstrom's film of The Cider House Rules; the recent US reworking of The Italian Job; and two Woody Allen movies, Celebrity and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.
Three years ago, when she was making the underrated kidnapping thriller, Trapped, the Irish actor, Stuart Townsend, was cast as her husband. Life imitating art, they have been partners since then. "It's funny," she says, "because I remember joking to the director, Luis Mandoki, when he was casting the part, that I hoped he would find me a good husband. Then this happens."
Townsend, her partner in crime as she described him in her Oscar speech, was a rock of support on the night of the awards. "He was amazing. He kept telling me to breathe, to just relax. I really didn't even want to go to the ceremony, but when I told that to anyone they said I shouldn't worry, that I was the favourite.Now I've seen the Academy Awards often enough to know that there is never any certainty and that it can be a disadvantage to be the front-runner."
Her Oscar victory earned her a hero's welcome when she returned home to South Africa a few weeks later. "When we arrived at the airport, there were flowers and cards everywhere," she says. "People were so supportive. It was so emotional." President Mbeki asked to meet her, and she caught up with Nelson Mandela, whom she has known for four years. "Every time I go back, I try to meet him," she says. "I'm very involved with his children's foundation. He is an extraordinary man." They first met when he presented her with a Woman of the Year award in recognition of her hard-hitting 1999 media campaign opposing violence against women in South Africa.
Theron's next movie features her in another real-life portrayal, as actress Britt Ekland in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which stars Geoffrey Rush in the title role. "It's different from Monster because it's not her life story. It's the life story of Peter Sellers and she is one of the characters in that story. The five years they were married was a really interesting time in his life. I only worked on the film for 10 days and I never got to meet her personally."
Meanwhile, Theron's Oscar win has boosted her salary to $10 million for her next project, playing the acrobatic superhero of Aeon Flux, which starts filming in July and is based on the futuristic animated MTV series. And she has completed a second movie with Stuart Townsend, Head in the Clouds, which opens later this year.
"It's a beautiful love story that takes place over 11 years before the second World War," she says. "Stuart plays a conservative, politically driven Irishman teaching in London, and my character is a wealthy, provocative socialite who meets him. When they lose touch for a while, she meets a woman played by Penelope Cruz and she takes her under her wing as a protégé. Then Stuart returns and the three of them live together in a Paris apartment."
Theron says she has been to Dublin many times with her partner. "I love it there. Stuart has got a great, great group of people over there, and I feel like I'm part of this great Irish family. I feel like I have a family for the first time in my life because of these people. In a way, it's like going home to South Africa for me. I feel I'm among people who know me and they take such good care of us. It's like the children coming home. I love the energy of Irish life and the way people are with each other and that they don't take each other too seriously."
And is there any substance to all the media stories that Theron and Townsend are getting married? "It's funny, but the more we deny it, the more I read that we are getting married," she says, laughing out loud. "I said to Stuart that we should just say we are getting married and maybe then the papers will say we aren't. Even at the Oscars, this woman said she had heard that this person was walking me down the aisle and that someone else was making our cake and that the wedding was the following Saturday. I said, 'That sounds great, but we're not going to be there. We didn't get our invitations.' Then, the next day, she had it all in the paper as if it was going to happen, as if I hadn't denied it so clearly.
"No, we're not getting married, but we're very, very happy. We're madly in love. I'm the luckiest girl on the face of the earth - not only to be going through these great moments in my career, but to have someone to share that with is incredible. He's amazing. He's a gem."
Monster is on limited release