Charlize Theron

She has won an Oscar for her work onscreen, but there's no role more important to the South Africa-born actress than advocate for health and human rights at home.

- LESLEY M.M. BLUME

It’s not that I’m biased because I’m from there,” Charlize Theron says of South Africa. Although for more than two decades the Oscar winner has been one of Hollywood’s most successful actresses and producers, her heart remains in her home country. “It is one of those places that’s truly, truly special,” she says. “You can ask anybody who has ever been. I’ve never not heard somebody talk that way about the country.”

Yet growing up there in the 1980s, amid the onset of the AIDS epidemic—which still grips the country today—was also traumatic for her. “I was around 10 years old, and people around me were dying and scared,” she recalls. “We now know that it was HIV and AIDS, but not a lot of people had that information then. It left an impression on me from a young age that has always been hard to shake.”

After Theron moved to the U.S. in the 1990s, her acting career skyrocketed following breakout roles in 2 Days in the Valley and The  Devil’s Advocate. Yet, she says, “I wanted to still be a part of my country in a proactive way, and so I was looking at how I could be of service.”

In 2007 she founded the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Program. Among the organization’s earliest initiatives was the dispatching of mobile health clinics in South Africa, in partnership with Oprah’s Angel Network, that offered HIV prevention programs to young people. These mobile units were a start, but Theron says she quickly realized that they were “a drop in the bucket.” Many factors were driving the AIDS pandemic; she and her colleagues would need to expand CTAOP’s mission to include wider education and health initiatives.