CHARLIZE THERON - THERON IMPRESSED WITH BOYFRIEND'S SCREENPLAY EFFORTS

CHARLIZE THERON has heaped praise on her "incredible" boyfriend STUART TOWNSEND after watching him toil over his first movie script. The Oscar-winning actress reveals Townsend wrote the screenplay for Battle in Seattle at the home the couple shares in Los Angeles - and suffered the rejections and nerves as her partner attempted to shop his script around Hollywood. She says, "The amount of passion, of time and effort that he committed to writing that script really blew me away. "When you love somebody and you're that close somebody, we always expect the worst because he had never written a script before, but we're very good at kind of separating our work from our relationship so, as a work colleague, when he gave me the script and I read it I wanted to be as honest as I possibly could. "I'll never forget the day when he gave it to me and the paper was still hot from coming out of the printer and I was in the kitchen. "He left because he was nervous and disappeared for three hours. I sat in the kitchen and I couldn't stop reading it. "Then I saw him go through the struggle that a lot of first time filmmakers go through when they have a great piece of material but it's original and it's different. "I tip my hat to this guy because what he did was really incredible." Theron was so impressed with the Irishman's efforts, she insisted on taking a lead role, opposite Ray Liotta, Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson and Michelle Rodriguez.