Charlize Theron has the whole movie star thing backward. The South African beauty looks amazing in real life, but in her last few roles she has been absolutely regular on screen.

Usually, a movie star employs an entire cadre of stylists and lighting specialists to create an aura of angelic beauty that only seems to exist on 100-foot screens. But 30-year-old Theron, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the scraggly serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster for director Patty Jenkins, uses her crew to cover up that powdery white skin, glowing blonde hair and perfect teeth and cheekbones.

For her latest Oscar-worthy performance, as a coal miner in North Country, she even considered using contact lenses to make her eyes go off-kilter and prosthetics to give her a few bumps on her face and redirect her gum line. She wasn't interested in how she looked; she only wanted to get her character right, and that meant looking like an '80s tough girl from Northern Minnesota who ends up among the first women working in the coal mines.

Critics are already hailing the movie as this year's Erin Brockovich, with its tale of Josey Aimes fighting pernicious sexual harassment all alone against a giant corporation ‑- and even her female colleagues ‑- in a small town where she's already a pariah because she had a child out of wedlock at 16. Theron decided to dress down her features with head scarves and the dirt that comes with working around coal, and she stuck to flannels and work boots for her wardrobe.