LOS ANGELES -- The Academy Awards have a history of honoring glamorous or handsome performers who obscure their beauty to play beasts, and Charlize Theron continued the tradition with her best-actress win for "Monster" Sunday night.
Many regarded Theron, a former model and ballerina, as the front-runner for the award after she gained 30 pounds and wore prosthetic teeth and splotchy makeup to play real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Critics hailed both her emotional and physical transformation.
During her acceptance speech, Theron tearfully thanked makeup artist "Toni G, for transforming me so incredibly."
"This has been such an incredible year," she said while clutching her Oscar.
Make that three incredible years in a row.
Last year, Nicole Kidman collected the same honor for subverting her glamorous image with makeup and a prosthetic nose to play the drab-looking character of suicidal author Virginia Woolf in "The Hours."
When she first saw her delicate features rendered virtually unrecognizable, Kidman said she thought it "could either look totally ridiculous or it will really help people get lost in the character and the film."
"Once you become attached to your identity as an actor, you're in dangerous territory," Kidman told The Associated Press last year. "My job is to say, 'I give you my heart and soul and am willing to sweat blood for this.' Everything else is to be changed, reused and discovered."
In 2002, Halle Berry claimed the best-actress Oscar for de-glamming as a working-class mother who has a gritty sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton in "Monster's Ball."
Other actresses whose scruffy makeovers paid off include Elizabeth Taylor, who rejuvenated her sagging post-"Cleopatra" career with a boozy turn in 1966's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The screen beauty let her hair go gray and gained weight, and earned her second lead-actress Oscar.
When "Raging Bull" came out in 1980, it was considered shocking that Robert De Niro would pack on 60 pounds to play the aging boxer. Since then, stars have tried to emulate the same kind of buzz.
Tom Hanks won his first actor Oscar for playing a frail AIDS patient in "Philadelphia." Hanks also was nominated for "Cast Away," in which he beefed up - then took a break in filming to emaciate himself for his character's extended desert island stay.
And before he won his "Gladiator" trophy, Russell Crowe earned an acting nomination for playing a portly, snowy-haired corporate whistleblower in "The Insider."
The actor most renowned for hiding his real face was silent-film great Lon Chaney, nicknamed "Man of a Thousand Faces" for his starring roles in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "The Phantom of the Opera," and "A Blind Bargain," in which he played dual roles as a doctor and ape man.
Chaney began developing his own makeup and prosthetics to portray monsters, in part, because some filmmakers thought he wasn't handsome enough for mainstream leading-man roles.
But he never won an Oscar - perhaps, because he wasn't pretty enough in the first place.
