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Charlize – Life’s one helluva ride
Chris Karsten
For Simone
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
