AGAINST TYPE.(The Talk of the Town)(Charlize Theron)(Biography)

The former dancer and model Charlize Theron, who stands five feet nine inches tall in her stocking feet, was in town recently to promote the new film "Monster," in which she plays the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed by lethal injection in 2002 for murdering seven men. The chance to play against type (as Wuornos, Theron wears oversized prosthetic teeth, brown contact lenses, and heavy makeup simulating freckles, sun damage, and a lifetime of booze) is what attracted Theron to the material. "I mean, I could have gone on forever--well, at least another ten years--as 'that girl,' " Theron said over lunch. Dressed in dark trousers and a black V-necked sweater, and wearing a pendant around her long white neck, Theron, who is twenty-eight, was the very image of the roles she has played in the past, in such movies as "Reindeer Games" and "The Italian Job": blond, intelligent, ambitious women capable of detonating a bomb at a moment's notice. "But what's the point of going on in those kinds of parts if it doesn't mean anything?" she continued. "My cup was filled, but I had to turn it over and make everything spill out and look at the mess in order to make me different." After ordering a Coke and a bowl of tomato soup, she tore off a corner of the Times and wrapped her gum in it. "I'm a real classy date," she said.

"Honey, Aileen couldn't get arrested," Theron went on. "Wait. That came out weird. Of course she got arrested--a lot--but she couldn't turn her life around. She was always trying to get away from prostitution. She tried to join the Army, but they wouldn't take her because she was deaf in one ear. Still, she never lost her hope--her belief--that there was something better out there." Though Wuornos dreamed of being a star of one sort or another, Theron didn't; she grew up on a farm in Benoni, South Africa, where she spoke Afrikaans ("When I came to the States, I barely spoke English") and studied ballet. "There weren't a lot of movies out ...