Charlize Theron recently shaved her head for a role. From Lady Gaga to Natalie Portman, see other stars who went bald.
South African beauty Charlize Theron doesn't need to prove to anyone that she can turn heads. In 2003 she underwent a radical transformation to tackle the role of a murderous woman in 2003's Monster, for which she won an Academy Award. And this year, she stunned as the eternally youthful Evil Queen in Snow White and the Huntsman opposite Kristen Stewart. So when she was spotted Monday with new son Jackson wearing a baseball cap that appeared to cover a freshly buzzed cut, we hardly blinked an eye. Her reps confirmed that the bombshell sheared off her usually bright blond locks for a role in the upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road. The action flick co-stars Tom Hardy and starts shooting next month in Africa.
It’s a look that’s more punk than country, but Kellie Pickler is willing to take that risk. The country singer shaved her blond hair on Good Morning America on Wednesday in a touching show of support for her childhood best friend, Summer Miller, who is battling breast cancer and started chemotherapy the same day. Pickler isn’t cut up about it, though: within hours, she tweeted that she is “thinking about being ‘G.I. Jane’ for Halloween.”
Lady Gaga made news when she arrived at the 2011 Grammy Awards inside a giant egg, but this weekend she resembled one. Appearing on the U.K.’s Paul O’Grady Show, Gaga performed an acoustic version of her song “Hair” while sitting at a piano covered with brunette wigs. Wearing a sea-green dress to match her bob, Mother Monster pulled off her hair in the middle of the performance to reveal a smooth, bare head (that appeared to be a bald cap). While the beauty statement was presumably meant to reflect the lyrics—I just wanna be myself / And I want you to love, me for who I am. / I just wanna be myself, / And I want you to know, I am my hair—in the end, Gaga looked like the love child of Paul Shaffer and a mannequin.
The combination of shaving her head and dating Kanye West helped Amber Rose’s modeling career take off—she signed with Ford Models and appeared in a provocative Louis Vuitton ad with West. Though she has since ended the relationship with the hip-hop star, Rose has maintained the close shave, often dyeing it blond.
SIPA / AP Photo
The credo of Star Trek was “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” But when the TV series was transported to the big screen in 1979, it was a woman who went to a daring new place. To portray Lieutenant Ilia, a Deltan navigator in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Indian actress (and former Miss India) Persis Khambatta shaved her head for the role. "Basically, they had asked me if I would shave my head or wear a bald cap,” Khambatta later said in an interview. “I said, Look, if you are doing a series for five years I would want to shave my hair because I would go bald with all the gum and glue from the bald cap."
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When Frenchie Davis became a semi-finalist on the second season of American Idol, it wasn’t her close-cropped haircut that shocked producers—it was photographs of her bare breasts. When it was revealed that the 23-year-old fan favorite had once posed topless for a website, she was kicked off the program. But in show business, it isn’t over until the bald lady sings. Davis went on to star in Rent on Broadway and the still-bald diva is currently one of the finalists on Christina Aguilera’s team on The Voice.
Mitchell Haaseth / NBC / AP Photo
Several months after her marriage to Kevin Federline fell apart in November 2006, Britney Spears went through a classic late-night partying phase. But then the 25-year-old pop star made a very public cry for help when she asked that her blond hair be shaved off at Esther’s Hair Salon in Tarzana, California. "She sat in my chair and said, 'I want my hair shaved off.’ I said well I'm not doing it.” salon owner Esther Tognozzi told Extra. “Of course I tried to talk her out of it," Tognozzi went on. "I said, 'You know maybe you're having a hormonal moment or something, and maybe tomorrow you'll feel differently about it. Let's talk about this." So Spears shaved it off herself—on camera—and then tried to laugh off the scary new ‘do by covering it up with a pretty pink wig.
