20. The Road (2009)
In this disturbing story of a father and son making their way across a post-apocalyptic America, Charlize Theron appears in flashback as the boy’s mother. Theron is a potent image of paradise lost, although it appears she has deserted her husband and child, intriguingly clouding her moral status.
19. Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
This fairy tale reboot has the interesting and witty casting of Theron as the Evil Queen, consumed with jealousy of Snow White (Kristen Stewart) – although it is the ice-blonde Theron who more deserves the title of Snow White. She is terrified of losing her beauty and like the fabled “Blood Countess”, Elizabeth Báthory, uses virgins’ blood to replenish it.
18. Reindeer Games (2000)
An essentially decorative role for Theron in this madly convoluted noir from John Frankenheimer. Theron plays Ashley, a woman who has been having a romantic penpal relationship with a convict who is killed in a knife-fight just before his release. His cellmate Rudy (Ben Affleck), released at the same time, sees the lovely Ashley and passes himself off as her epistolary lover. Soon they are having non-epistolary sex, but then Rudy gets mixed up with a criminal plan dreamed up by Ashley’s brother.
17. The Cider House Rules (1999)
In this deeply strange film by Lasse Hallström, Theron plays Candy, a young woman who arrives with her boyfriend, Wally (Paul Rudd), at a prewar orphanage run by Dr Larch (Michael Caine), who secretly offers abortions. Larch’s young protege, Homer (Tobey Maguire), befriends them, goes with them to Rudd’s family farm and falls deeply in love with Candy while Wally is away fighting in the second world war. They go for soulful walks on the beach and Homer intuits that Candy has profound emotional trauma. Theron does her best in this odd, muddled film.
16. Aeon Flux (2005)
With her striking asymmetrical black hairstyle, Theron presents here the action-movie mode that has become an important part of her screen persona. It hardly needs saying, but she is almost scarily beautiful and, with its interesting martial arts stylings, this is an underrated sci-fi action flick.
15. The Old Guard (2020)
Theron is the leader of an elite warrior crew who are all immortal, condemned to fight for justice as the centuries roll by. A return to her asymmetrical black hair mode, which she still carries off with great hauteur and charisma, although it is a pity this action movie doesn’t do her justice.
14. Sleepwalking (2008)
This was a labour of love for Theron, who has a producer’s credit. She plays the feckless single mother of a little kid, who runs off with a truck driver leaving her daughter with her brother, played by Nick Stahl, who does his best to look after her. Theron is a fleeting presence, and many felt she should have awarded herself more screentime.
13. Hancock (2008)
Theron plays Mary, whose husband, Ray (Jason Bateman), has his life saved by the chaotic, ridiculous Hancock. He’s a wacky anti-superhero, played by Will Smith, whose exploits are widely resented, as they cause more problems than they solve. Mary is herself no stranger to superpowers, though she has opted for a quieter, non-superhero life. This subdued role is perhaps symptomatic of the way Theron and maybe all female stars get treated in Hollywood.
12. Bombshell (2019)
This strained, contorted but intermittently powerful film about the Fox News TV sex-abuse scandal is compromised by its inability to decide if Fox staffers can be shown sympathetically. But Theron gives an interesting, if mannered performance as Megyn Kelly, the Fox News presenter who challenges Trump on his misogynist attitudes.
11. Head in the Clouds (2004)
Theron co-starred here with her then partner, the Irish actor Stuart Townsend, in this outrageously silly but entertaining period melodrama. She’s a Zuleika Dobson-type femme fatale at Oxford in the 1930s who has an affair with Townsend’s smitten student, who is then to be the intimate witness of her wartime adventures as the lover of a beautiful model, played by Penélope Cruz, and then the apparent mistress (or maybe spy) on the arm of a top Nazi. Goofy stuff, but there’s a lot here for Theron to do, and she has fun with the role.
10. Mighty Joe Young (1998)
This remake of the 1949 family favourite gives Theron her Fay Wray moment. She plays Jill, a naturalist who has been caring for Joe, a giant, sweet-natured 15ft gorilla. She is persuaded to bring Joe out of his Ugandan habitat to Los Angeles where a wildlife conservancy will apparently foot the bills – but an evil poacher is ready to pounce. There are lots of high-spirited adventures for Joe with Jill often in his (chaste) embrace.
9. The Yards (2000)
James Gray’s tough, dour, impassioned drama about crime and municipal corruption stars Mark Wahlberg as Leo, out of jail and heartbreakingly determined to go straight, who winds up working on the railway yards, where working practices are crooked. Theron plays his cousin Erica, dating Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), the guy Leo saved from prison by not snitching. Erica represents a kind of beautiful prospect of freedom, the life Leo hasn’t had while in prison and may never have.
8. Atomic Blonde (2017)
Theron brings some serious martial arts chops to this action spy thriller set in 80s East Berlin. She will sashay through some neon-lit nightclub and accept with a knowing smile a Stoli on the rocks and some badinage from the barman, before putting the smackdown on some brutish thug. It may all be a bit silly, but Theron has some amazingly good one-on-one combat scenes and extended punchups where she shows that she is an authentic action star.
7. Prometheus (2012)
It is always good to see Theron playing an authority figure, and in Ridley Scott’s hi-tech prequel to Alien she plays Meredith Vickers, the gorgeously icy, black jumpsuit-clad corporate figure whose shadowy company is bankrolling an intergalactic expedition that may discover the origins of human existence. The ship is called Prometheus, and Vickers is aboard as the official representative with a frosty habit of treating everyone as an inferior. Theron is the ice cube that keeps the drink cool.
6. Tully (2018)
Diablo Cody wrote this intriguing and elegant satire on the terrible tolls of marriage and motherhood, directed by Jason Reitman. Theron plays Marlo, a careworn woman on the verge of breakdown due to sleeplessness caused by a young baby. Her wealthy brother hires a “night nanny” for her (Mackenzie Davis) and this impossibly slim, pretty, lithe young woman is superb with the baby. Marlo is obsessed with her carefree youth and health (things that she can remember having) and her burgeoning closeness with the nanny takes her to some very dark places. Theron boldly shows how her character, having already deteriorated, can spin further down.
5. In the Valley of Elah (2007)
This excellent drama shows that Theron can rise to the occasion when she is paired with a strong co-star. That’s certainly what she gets with Tommy Lee Jones, who plays a retired military police inspector. He’s trying to discover the truth about the mysterious death of his son, a serving soldier, whose body was discovered in scrubland near his military base in New Mexico. Also on the case is a civilian cop, played by Theron, a lonely single mum who has been humiliated after a calamitious affair with her married boss. These two unhappy souls come together in the cause of justice, and achieve a quasi-father-daughter friendship. Strong, empathetic performance from Theron.
4. Long Shot (2019)
Why hasn’t Theron done more comedy? This is great stuff from her, playing Charlotte, a dazzlingly glamorous and brilliant politician who is a presidential hopeful. Seth Rogen plays Fred, a schlubby, beardy loser of a journalist whom Charlotte once babysat when he was a tiny kid. Now she decides to employ him as her speechwriter because he’s one of the very few men around whom she can relax. Poor Fred soon falls deeply in love with her, and who knows if it isn’t reciprocated? A tender, smart, beguiling performance from Theron.
3. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Theron created an instant icon in George Miller’s crazy, operatically over-the-top action-chase thriller fantasia set in the post-apocalyptic desert, a 21st-century update of his Mad Max classic. Tom Hardy plays Max, fighting against the tyrannical warlord chieftain Immortan Joe. On his side is the dazzling Imperator Furiosa, the one-armed badass played with glittery-eyed panache by Theron, whose job is to lead raids, stealing gasoline, ammunition and other necessities. Furiosa always looks as if she has just walked away from (and perhaps caused) an explosion that has made her slightly smudgy-faced and yet is always very glamorous and stylish.
2. Monster (2003)
Theron gave the world an absolute barnstorming and indeed Oscar-winning performance in this gruesome true-crime movie, “uglied up” to play the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed for seven murders just one year before this film came out. Theron had clearly studied the real-life Wuornos from the two documentaries about her by Nick Broomfield and created an eerily clever, chilling impersonation of a young woman who had been forced by poverty into sex work and found that her talent was in killing her male clients. Theron’s brown contact lenses create the glassily reptilian belligerent stare, and the flaky dull skin is fabricated with prosthetics. But makeup is only a fraction of what Theron does with this role, showing, through Wuornos’s tense, clenched body language, the reality that her whole life has been a fight she is destined one day to lose.
1. Young Adult (2011)
This wasn’t Theron’s Oscar-prestige movie, but it is her best: the most subtle, evolved, persuasively horrible and funniest performance she has ever given, in a black comedy written by Cody and directed by Reitman. She plays the unspeakable Mavis Gary, a jaded former prom queen for whom high school was clearly the most important time of her life, and who now writes generic young-adult fiction, eavesdropping on teen conversations in malls to put into her books, and compulsively rewriting her own tales of teen triumph. She is a functioning alcoholic and depressive, heading for some kind of breakdown, which arrives when she chances upon a round-robin email from her old boyfriend, who attaches a picture of his heartrendingly lovely new baby.
Mavis is electrified with a new project: she will return to her hometown, with all its pathetic contemptible losers, and break up her ex’s marriage – because they are clearly fated to be together. Theron makes a superb sociopath, even scarier than in Monster, because of her incomplete touch of satirical self-knowledge and also, I think, because of the seductively husky low voice. She also has a kind of “loser” non-romance with Patton Oswalt, not unlike the one she has with Seth Rogen in Long Shot, but this has far more edge. There is something very evil about her Mavis, something magnificently unsympathetic. Not every heroine has to be relatable. And Theron certainly isn’t here.
