HOLLYWOOD -- It's not just casting directors and audiences who are going ape over South African beauty Charlize Theron. These days even apes are losing their hearts to the 23-year-old actress. On Christmas Day in Mighty Joe Young, Theron stars as Jill Young, an African girl whose best friend is a giant ape.
                  
Mighty Joe and Jill lost their mothers to poachers on the same day and grew up together in a remote African village.  Eventually, Jill is persuaded to bring Mighty Joe to an animal preserve in Los Angeles and thus begins their incredible adventure.
                  
When Theron arrived in Los Angeles four years ago, she had $500 to her name.   "I knew no one and I had no contacts. The first thing I did was find a modelling agency that would agree to send me out on auditions," says Theron.   Theron had come to L.A. hoping to become an actress. She intended to model in order to earn  money to study acting. She'd been modelling since she was 16, but it wasn't her dream career. "I only ever modelled as a means to an end. I hated every minute of it. My first modelling job got me from South Africa to Milan and it eventually got me to America."
                  
Theron was raised on a farm near a tiny village outside of Johannesburg.
"It was the kind of village where kids rode donkeys to school. My best friend was my pet goat named Bok.  "I was the kind of child who had incredible dreams.  I'd want to be a guitar player and then dancer and
 always my mother would try to accommodate those dreams."
                  
Theron began taking ballet lessons at age four and was enrolled in an arts boarding school in Johannesburg when she was 12. "My parents didn't have a good marriage. My father was an alcoholic. My mother did everything to protect me from that reality, including sending me  to a boarding school." Theron's father was killed in a car accident when she was 15. Her mother eventually remarried.  "My stepfather has been as supportive of my whims as my mother always was."

That's why she was allowed to go to Milan on her own when she was16. When Theron arrived in New York at age 18, she immediately enrolled in ballet classes at the New York City Ballet.  "A few months later, I injured my knee. I was heartbroken and that's when I decided to go to Los Angeles." Part of Theron's $500 escape fund was a cheque from a modelling job she'd done in New York. When she tried to cash it in L.A., the bank teller refused and Theron literally threw a fit. "I needed that money and I was determined not to leave that bank without it."
                  
Her outburst attracted the attention of another customer, talent manager John Crosby, who approached her.  "He asked if I'd ever considered becoming an actress. I told him it was high on my list and he  agreed to represent me, provided I could get rid of my South African accent."
                  
Theron began watching TV shows non-stop, learning to modulate her vowels and soften her  consonants. A year later she was cast as the sexy
assassin in 2 Days in the Valley.  "It was a sex-kitten role and it was almost my undoing. I didn't work for a year because I only got
offers to take my clothes off." Then came her audition for Tom Hanks, who was  casting his little movie That Thing You Do. Theron got the role, proved she could play demure, and  hasn't stopped working since.
                  
She romanced Michael Richards in Trial and Error and played Keanu Reeves' wife in the satanic thriller Devil's Advocate. She played a nymphomaniac model for Woody Allen in Celebrity and has just completed filming The Astronaut's Wife with Johnny Depp. But the
 role she wanted most and had to fight hardest for was that of Jill in Mighty Joe Young. "(Director) Ron Underwood didn't want to audition me for the part. He'd only seen 2 Days in the Valley and thought I wasn't innocent or rural enough to play this little African girl. "I was furious. I insisted he let me read for him. I  told him that apart from the giant ape bit the movie was the story of my life." Underwood relented and once Theron actually auditioned she was offered the role. "This is the closest I've come to playing myself. All those femme fatale roles I've done are not me at all. I'm a bit common and crude. I'm a tomboy farm girl from Africa, after all."
                  
Joe is not Theron's only leading man in Mighty Joe Young.  She also gets to lose her heart to anthropologist Gregg O'Hara, played by Twister's Bill Paxton, but she never gets to kiss Paxton. "The writers couldn't find places in the movie for Bill and I to kiss logically. We filmed a few kisses, but none of them stayed in, whereas all my kisses  with Joe made it into the final version of the movie." In real life, Theron locks lips with rocker Stephan Jenkins, the guitarist for Third Eye Blind.