Charlize Theron: Playing beauty's dark side
(CBS News) Actress Charlize Theron has had a pretty busy start to her summer. She's currently in two movies out in theaters at the same time, and in both she plays rather dark characters. Our own Lee Cowan visited the Oscar-winner a short while ago, and has this Sunday Profile:
A version of this story was originally broadcast December 4, 2011.
Even in a tank top, walking her dogs in the Hollywood Hills, Charlize Theron is radiant - disarmingly so - and so is her sense of humor.
"When people refer to you as a movie star, or a mega star, what do you think about that term?" asked Cowan.
"Well, that's how it should be!" he laughed.
You learn very quickly that, despite her A-list status, Charlize Theron is as grounded as ever.
"The greatest thing that I've learned in my journey in doing this, is that if you come with your own agenda and with your own ego and you try to kind of force something and control something, you can't make a good movie," Theron said.
And her making of GOOD movies lately entails playing a lot of nasty characters.
Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" opened Friday, where Theron plays a corporate suit (in a space suit), and she's as suspicious as they come.
From a sci-fi future to a fantasy past - Theron's other current role is the mean queen in "Snow White & the Hunstman."
It's quite a departure from her last role, which was a queen of a different sort. In "Young Adult," Theron played a former homecoming queen who returns to her hometown to reclaim a high school flame - all with a hint of humor.
And for Theron, THAT was a first.
"There's definitely a moment, especially in my career, I tend to have people in tears or throwing up in bathrooms," she laughed. "So to hear them giggle was definitely, after nearly 20 years of doing this, a new experience for me, yeah! I looked at my producing partner and said, 'They're laughing! They're laughing at me!'"
"Where you surprised?
"Yeah, because you never know what people are going to tap into," Theron said.
The characters audiences have "tapped into" in the past are often anything but glamorous, like her Oscar-nominated portrayal of miner Josey Aimes in "North Country."
"The characters that you portray so often are troubled and challenged," Cowan said.
"I'm very troubled," Theron laughed. "Lee, I'm really troubled. I am!"
"But what is it, though? What is it that draws you to those kinds of characters, at least the ones that tend to be the most memorable?"
"I guess I respond to those characters because when I read them they're familiar to me," she replied. "I know them. They feel human to me. They feel real to me. They don't feel like movie people."
Perhaps that's why her most famous role wasn't fictional at all - portraying real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in "Monster."
It was a performance that earned her the Oscar for Best Actress.
But there were plenty of skeptics early on: "Financiers at the time - I will never forget it - called me at 3:00 a.m. in the morning because I was a producer on it and said, 'We just saw the first dailies and we don't understand what you're doing. Why are you not smiling? Why do you look like that?' They didn't understand why I gained weight."
She's appeared in more than 30 films, and yet even now she says a great performance is still a puzzle.
"A lot of it I don't understand. I don't. A lot of it is a mystery to me."
"You like it that way?" Cowan asked.
"I do. I really love the mysteries of the world and of life. And I don't necessarily want to figure it out."
"You ever worry though that the mystery might not show up one day?" asked Cowan.
"Every day!" Theron said. "Are you kidding me? Every day I go to work!"
It's all a long way from the small South African farming community where Charlize Theron was born.
It's a country she still calls home - but also a place of tragedy.
At 15 she saw her mother, in an act of self-defense, shoot and kill Theron's abusive alcoholic father.
"As huge a moment as that was obviously in your life, it seems as though you've not let it define you in any way," said Cowan.
"You know, couldn't change it, not matter how much I wanted to," said Theron. "I was just never going to define myself as a victim. Maybe that's what I love about my characters. They're not victims. And they don't try to lean on those crutches, you know?"
She left home at 16, became a model, and studied ballet, before launching a movie career.
"I just loved acting so much that all I dreamed for was that I could support myself just doing that, that I didn't have to do a second job."
"How much money did you have?" asked Cowan.
"I had nothing. I was literally living from paycheck to paycheck," said Theorn. "Like, yeah, there was a time that I stole bread from a bread basket in a restaurant."
"You really stole bread?"
"Yeah! I put the bread in my bag. And I cherish those moments. I cherish them."
She's ended up putting down roots in California, and became a U.S. citizen.
"I'm not a passive person," she said. "I feel like if I'm going to be living here, then I want to contribute to my community. And I want to contribute to elections and I want to feel like I'm truly a part of it."
And now at 36, she says, her life is right where she wants it.
"Oh my God, my life is AMAZING!" she said. "I'm just a really blessed person. I have amazing friends, oh my God! You know, I just have really good luck. I come from a country where there's an awareness for me every single day of how blessed I am."
South Africa is never far from her heart. Four years ago, she started a charity, the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project.
Its goal is to reduce sexual violence, and educate the young about how to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS.
"There's no way that you can take a trip to South Africa and work with the kids that we work with, that you don't come home and open the fridge and you realize circumstances somehow worked out for you," she said. "They don't work out for everybody else in the world. That really grounds you."
In fact she says, she never expected it to work out as well as it has.
"I mean, the dream was never this big" Theron said.
"It really wasn't?
"No! God, no. Are you kidding me?"
She lives just a few miles from her mother, who she says is a model for the kind of mom she'd like to be. And now she has her chance.
In March Theron announced that she had adopted a baby boy named Jackson. She's a single mom - her nine-year relationship with actor Stuart Townsend ended years ago.
"Are you dating anybody now?" asked Cowan. "... not that I'm coming onto you."
"Yeah, wait a second!" she laughed. "No, I'm not. I'm single. I haven't been single since, God, since I was 19."
Being a new mom - and starring in two big summer movies - keeps her busy enough.
Acting, like life (she says), is full of surprises. And that's her favorite part.
"If there was anything that was guaranteed in this industry, we would be doing it over and over and over again," she said. "I think that's what's amazing about being in this business. It's creative. There is no recipe. It's all a stroke of luck sometimes."
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