Adult Behaviour

After a three-year absence, Charlize Theron is back on the screen and she's hotter property than ever. Donal O'Donoghue reports on the return of an Oscar-winner

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Charlize Theron at the 2011 Golden Globe

According to those who have met her - and even those who haven't - there a few things you should know about Charlize Theron. In no particular order, these are: she swears like a sailor, drinks like a fish and is funnier than laughing gas.

Some of this is true. The Oscar-winning actress, who returns to the screen next month after a three-year break, is not just 'one of most beautiful women in the world' (as Piers Morgan introduced her recently), she is also one of the most down-to-earth. That's the line on the 36-year-old - and if you don't believe it, then Theron herself is likely to put you straight - as she did with fawning Morgan and others.

Theron is the actress who might be mistaken for Cameron Diaz: at least until the director shouts 'action'. Five years after Woody Allen declared her "so hot that if she was in this room your buttons would melt", the South African won the Best Actress Oscar, for a ground-breaking performance as serial killer Aileen Wournos in Monster (2003), for which she gained weight and lost her good looks (thanks to buckets of make-up).

Proving that she was no one-trick pony, Theron was nominated a second time for North Country (2006): and since then has burned bright, even in ho-hum films. Jason Reitman, who directed her in her latest film, Young Adult, has remarked on her power as an actress: "She never does anything untruthful to win the sympathy of the audience", he said. "Even if it means taking us to the very bleakest places."

Last seen in the post-apocalyptic horror The Road, la st heard in the children's animation, Astro Boy, Theron continues to mine the less likeable aspects of humanity in the off-centre comedy that is Young Adult. She plays Mavis Gray, a 'prom queen bitch', as one of her former high-school classmates remembers her. Now in her mid-30s and recently divorced, the beer-guzzling hottie is suffering from a severe case of arrested development. Returning to her Minnesota hometown for a high-school reunion, Mavis determines to win back an old flame even though he is happily married.

It's a dark comedy about a lonely person - bagging Theron a Golden Globe nomination - from the award-winning team behind Juno; Reitman and Diablo Cody (writer). Reitman says he had nobody else in mind for the part. "The only way I was going to do this movie was if Charlize wanted to do it. It's a really tricky screenplay to pull off because the main character is so unlikable. But also she's so human and funny."

There is a scene in Young Adult in which Mavis stuffs chicken fillets into her bra to enhance her assets. That was Theron's idea, with the actress drawing on personal experience for the scene. "I was on this date and started making out, and it was moving a little further, so I realised I had to get the cutlets out", Theron told US Vogue recently. "But my bag was small, and I couldn't fit them in the thing. Jason (Reitman) was like, 'No way. That doesn't happen!' But that stuff happens to girls all the time."

Depending on which interview you read, Theron's three-year time out from acting was 'kind of just the way it turned out' or linked to the break-up of her nine-year relationship with Irish actor, Stuart Townsend. At one time, Theron talked about having children with Townsend - she still wants to have a family - but that was before the cracks began to appear. Desperate to save the union, Theron pulled out all the stops. "It was sinking and I had to give it a fight", she said recently. "I really wanted to try and make i! t work. That was the priority. I wouldn't do it any different way."

Following the break-up, Theron found herself single for the first time since she was 19. It was, she admitted, a foreign experience. Turning her back on acting, she tentatively pencilled in some travel plans. But a planned trip to Machu Picchu was jettisoned in favour of work with her own production company, Denver and Delilah, producing and developing TV shows as well as her charitable foundation, the Africa Outreach Project, which aims to reduce HIV/Aids infections among young Africans.

She says she didn't miss acting. "I don't think that I have to be in front of a camera to be creatively satisfied." Even so, when Theron returned to work on Young Adult, she had a moment three weeks into the shoot, when she realised how much acting meant to her. "I just kind of turned to (Reitman) and was like, 'I feel like me again.'"

Theron grew up in the small town of Benoni on the fringes of Johannesburg, the only child of Gerda and Charles. She talks of a happy childhood on a farm surrounded by animals (she still has a couple of dogs) and going to drive-in movies with her art-loving mother. But that world was shattered when her mother shot her father in self defence (he was drunk, aggressive and threatening them both with a loaded shotgun). Charlize was 15 at the time, home for the weekend from boarding school. Until 2001, when Time magazine broke the story, Theron said that her father died in a car accident. Since then she has had to carrry the legacy of what she has described as her "f**king tattoo.

"It was the great tragedy of my life", she told Morgan on CNN just before last Christmas. "But you know . . . I'm not the first person and I won't be the last person on this earth to experience something like that." In all interviews, including the Morgan one, Theron is at pains to stress that the tragedy - the case never went to trial as it was listed as justifiable homicide - should not cast a shadow on her mother, ! a one-in -a-million person who actually saved her life on more than one occasion.

Today, Gerda Theron lives close by her daughter in Los Angeles, where they regularly hike together, go to the movies (she was a fan of Young Adult, but not the darker films) and share a beer.It was her mother who encouraged her career: the driving force behind her becoming a fashion model in her late teens when she spent a number of years living and working in Milan. Then it was ballet at the prestigious Joffrey Ballet School in New York, but when a knee injury forced her to reconsider her career in the early 1990s, it was next stop Hollywood.

Now Theron's a major Tinseltown player. Her company has eight films primed for production and another four TV shows waiting for the green light. Her next acting project is likely to be George Miller's fourth entry in the Mad Max cycle, Fury Road, postponed from last year due to flooding on the Australian set. She has also wrapped Snow White and the Huntsman in which she plays the Evil Queen Ravenna to Kristen Stewart's Princess. But her most anticipated release is Prometheus, the Ridley Scott sci-fi epic that teasingly echoes his 1989 classic, Alien. Once touted as a prequel, it is in fact a stand-alone film, but Theron and the rest of the cast (which includes Michael Fassbender) are sworn to secrecy on its story.

But one thing we know: Charlize Theron is back and that can only be good.

* Young Adult is at selected cinemas from February 10.

Charlize Theron - Four Essential Films

Monster (2003)

The prosthetics were impressive but even more eye-opening was Theron's career-making, Oscar-winning performance. After Monster, the one-time supporting actress was right at the top of the Hollywood speed dial.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)

It's Geoffrey Rush's picture but Theron, as Sellers' second wife, Britt Ekland, more than holds h! er own i n this frantic biopic of the great British comedian (played by Rush), nabbing a Golden Globe nomination for her work.

North Country (2006)

Inspired by a real-life case, Theron plays a victim of sexual harassment in this gritty tale set in the mines of Minnesota. It might be less flash than the marquee lead of Monster but her Oscar-nominated performance is every bit as profound and compelling.

In the Valley of Elah (2007)

In a slowburning film with a quiet power, Theron quietly and effectively plays a police detective trying to help Tommy Lee Jones solve the case of his missing GI son.