Charlize Theron Shares Rare Photo of Daughters in Touching Post Celebrating Grandmother’s Birthday

Charlize Theron is celebrating her mother, and she’s enjoying being a mother herself in the process. The Old Guard star shared a photo set on Instagram celebrating her mother Gerda’s birthday, and she also shared a rare snapshot of her daughters Jackson, 10, and August, 7. The Oscar-winner tends to keep her children private and off of her social media, but she shared a photo of the girls hiking with their grandmother.

“Today is my mom’s birthday. I wanted to share her with all of you because anyone who knows her, knows how utterly awesome it’s is to stand in her sunlight,” Theron wrote. “She TRULY is life. She laughs louder than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s a great tennis player/golfer/hiker AND a gifted shit talker! She’s direct, she’s honest, she funny, and she’ll tell you how it is anytime of the day! Ma, ek lief jou oor die maan.”

For Theron, her mother Gerda was a major influence on how she viewed beauty. “My mom played a huge part because she exuded so much of what I believe beauty really is. But for me it wasn’t an aha moment,” Theron said in a 2018 interview with InStyle. “I was lucky at a young age to start traveling and seeing what people in other places did, what they ate, and what they smelled and looked like. I grew up in South Africa, a country that has more cultures than any other place in the world. All of that gave me an awareness.”

Theron adopted her daughter Jackson in 2012 and August in 2015, and she has spoken about what it’s like raising Black children in America, particularly in the wake of the ongoing conversations about police brutality and racial injustice. She explained that the news, particularly around the protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, led to some “hard, honest conversations” with her daughters.

“As a parent, it’s been a difficult time. I think all parents, we want to believe we have time. And the world has kind of shaken me in a way that I realize that I don’t have time,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “There was a moment where I felt like a little piece of my children’s innocence was taken from them during this period because I had to sit down with them and have really, really hard, honest conversations about some really ugly things in our world today that they need to know. I want them to know because I want to raise two little warriors.”