Glamour Guts And Glory

By Jess Cagle

Charlize Theron is drunk as a skunk and strapping on a parachute. "Too much altitude, ma'am!" says the pilot. "You'll surely die!" Theron, lovely in a black Versace gown and hot pink Manolo Blahnik mules, cares not one bit. She secures her parachute as she steps onto the wing, gives the pilot the finger and takes the plunge.

All right, that first paragraph was one big lie. But it's already a journalistic tradition to make Charlize Theron (the last name rhymes with heron) sound sexy, sassy and adventurous. Ever since her breakthrough role as Helga, the Teutonic man killer in the 1996 shoot-'em-up flick 2 Days in the Valley, magazines and newspapers have delighted in telling her story: how she modeled and danced her way off a farm in South Africa, how a bad knee ended her ballet career, how she was discovered by a Hollywood talent manager in a bank. Despite a large body of work, including noticeable turns in 1997's The Devil's Advocate and last year's Best Picture Oscar nominee The Cider House Rules, Theron's celebrity far outweighs her box office. She gets play in the press because, frankly, she's a kick. She's usually depicted as golfing, cooking, cussing, drinking and smoking (or some combination thereof), while the accompanying photos display a woman of almost otherworldly glamour, a lone Lana Turner among the current crop of Winona Ryder clones.

"I read these stories about me," says Theron, 25, who's actually wearing blue jeans and munching on French fries in a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, "and I think, 'Whoa! I want to be that girl.'" Today, except for the occasional swear word, she's very low-key. She's doing nothing to distract us from her one truly remarkable, and too often ignored, aspect: her admirable versatility as an actress.

The proof will be coming soon to a cineplex near you. In The Yards, a crime drama that opened last week, Theron is almost unrecognizable as a troubled young woman from New York City, with dark hair, heavy eyeliner and complicated feelings for Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix. On Nov. 3 she'll add some much needed levity and sex appeal to a Depression-era golf fable, The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Matt Damon and Will Smith, directed by Robert Redford. The following week she'll show up in a smaller role opposite Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr. in the 1950s military drama Men of Honor.

"Beauty can be a hindrance," says Redford, who was charmed by her work in the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young and cast her in Bagger Vance in part because her old-fashioned movie-star looks translate so well to period films. "It can make you too much aware of yourself. But she just dives into a role with a kind of abandon and a surprising amount of craft."

Theron's had a lot of on-the-job training. Since 1995 she has made 13 features, and she has four more in the works (including Woody Allen's next movie). Some of the films have been terrible (The Astronaut's Wife), but all in all, that's not bad for a girl who arrived in L.A. just six years ago with dreams of becoming an actress, very little dramatic training and "a couple hundred bucks in my bag," she recalls. "But I was completely fearless."

That fearlessness has served her well. When director John Herzfeld was auditioning actresses for 2 Days, he asked them to sit and read a scene in which Helga was shot. But Theron unexpectedly fell to the floor and crawled across the room as she read her lines; when she died, a star was born. In Bagger Vance, as a steel magnolia rekindling sparks with the lover who once abandoned her (Damon), she bites bravely into the hammiest of lines--"Now I'm supposed to run inta ya ahms and melt like buttah on a hot muffin?"--and chews so deftly that she avoids choking.

Like any other Thoroughbred, she can bite off-camera as well. "She needs you to focus on what she's doing, and if you neglect her, she gets really upset," says James Gray, the director of The Yards. He and the star quarreled often while making the movie, having one blowout over the way Theron was holding a glass of beer. "I thought, 'What the f___?'" recalls Theron. "'What about my acting?'"

"She's an astonishing actress," says Gray, now that they're friends again. "I got the sense that she has an interesting and troubled past. It's the only thing that could explain the depth of emotion." He may be referring obliquely to Theron's adolescence, when her father was shot and killed by her mother in self-defense. Though her mother wasn't charged with a crime, Theron previously told reporters that her father died in a car accident. These days Theron, who lives near her mother, who has also immigrated to Los Angeles, prefers not to talk about the tragedy. ("We've moved on," she says.) Asked what lasting effect it had on her, she replies, "You realize life is very short. You can't mess around."

That sense of the clock ticking is what compels Theron to work so much and push so hard. While her innate star quality has propelled her to the front ranks of the up-and-coming ingenues, she still must keep an eye on Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow. "You have to be willing to go to the director and go, 'Look!'" says Theron. "You sometimes have to convince them." While she doesn't plan to lighten her work load, she is becoming more reticent with the press. Asked if she's engaged to her longtime boyfriend, singer Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind, she responds, "This is the part where I would shoot my mouth off. He's great. There ya go."

But just as you start to worry that Theron is clamming up--which would have huge implications for the publishing industry--she lets loose with a vintage Charlize Theron statement: "I'm gonna live till I'm 80, and when I'm wrinkled and dying, I can say, 'I f______ tried everything.'" We look forward to parachutes and pink mules.