Charlize Theron: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

4. Mary Ann Lomax - The Devil's Advocate (1997)

Just two years after her screen debut as the decidedly unglamorous "Young Woman" in the woeful Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, Theron made a step up to the big time opposite an atypically excellent Keanu Reeves and a scene-chewing Al Pacino.

To be frank, any performance that manages to steal any of the limelight when Pacino - generously shorn of all restraint by the chance to play Lucifer in a $10,000 suit - is in full flow deserves to be handed an Oscar on the spot.

But it's not only that balance that counts towards the success of the role. Theron plays a picture book wife of a high-flying lawyer, frustrated and isolated and robbed of her own identity. Her eventual spiral into despair and trauma is inherently linked to Reeves' rise to power under his Devil father, and without her raw-nerve emotional performance, his typically deadpan reactions wouldn't have landed at all. Instead, there is a curious clash in their extremes, which adds the perfect otherwordly note to Reeves.

And when she ultimately takes her life, it's an astonishingly provocative moment that remains difficult to watch.