The movie Charlize Theron called “the best I’ve ever seen”
Charlize Theron isn’t your average movie star. She might not make the kinds of movies that win Oscars every year (though she’s done enough of them to win a ‘Best Actress’ award and two other nominations), but she is groundbreaking nonetheless.
How many other female stars have found a niche as an action hero? Theron has not only cornered the entire goddamn market, but she’s set a template to which other actors can aspire as well.
Because of this, it’s challenging to speculate on who her cinematic role models might be: Pam Grier is the original action queen, of course, but she never got her critical flowers the way Theron has, and until recently, Michelle Yeoh was in the same boat, Linda Hamilton hasn’t generated Oscar buzz, and Angelina Jolie was only stepping into her action movie era around the time Theron was.
As it turns out, you have to look back a lot further to find the female star whose work affects the Mad Max: Fury Road star the most, and the actor in question had nothing to do with the action genre. In 2007, Theron revealed that the 1963 Judy Garland movie I Could Go on Singing is the one that she’ll get up at any hour of the day to see if it’s on television. She’ll even do it at seven in the morning when she’d rather be soundly sleeping.
Directed by Ronald Neame, the film stars Garland as Jenny, an acclaimed concert singer who briefly reconnects with her former lover David (Dirk Bogarde) while on tour in London, and when their affair results in a child, whom David raises as if he’d been adopted, Jenny insists on meeting the boy and then takes him out of school to spend the day with him.
For Theron, it is unsurpassed. “Oh, it just kills me,” she said. “So good, so good! It’s my favourite film of all time.”
Despite being far outside the realm of her own movies, it’s easy to see why I Could Go on Singing would have such an impact on the actor. Part of it has to be Garland’s performance. At that stage in her life, her painful story of being a child star in Hollywood was well-documented. She had been through several publicly messy divorces, suffered through substance abuse, and career doldrums. All of that was etched into her performance in I Could Go on Singing.
In the following six years before her death, Garland never made another film. She had a brief but successful variety show on TV, a few disastrous stage shows, and two more short-lived marriages. She didn’t receive any accolades for her performance in the film, though, as Theron can attest, she probably should have.
Even after everything she had been through in the public eye, she never lost the ability to be completely vulnerable on camera, a skill or affliction that always set her apart from her peers.
