On this period in her career, Theron remarked: "I kept finding myself in a place where directors would back me but studios didn't. [I began] a love affair with directors, the ones I really, truly admired. I found myself making really bad movies, too. "Reindeer Games" was not a good movie, but I did it because I loved [director] John Frankenheimer." Theron starred as a safe and vault "technician" in the 2003 heist film "The Italian Job", an American homage/remake of the 1969 British film of the same name, directed by F. Gary Gray and opposite Mark Wahlberg, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, Seth Green, and Donald Sutherland. The film was a box office success, grossing US$176 million worldwide. In "Monster" (2003), Theron portrayed serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a former prostitute who was executed in Florida in 2002 for killing six men (she was not tried for a seventh murder) in the late 1980s and early 1990s; film critic Roger Ebert felt that Theron gave "one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema". For her portrayal, she was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 76th Academy Awards in February 2004, as well as the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Golden Globe Award. She is the first South African to win an Oscar for Best Actress. The Oscar win pushed her to "The Hollywood Reporter's" 2006 list of highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, earning up to US$10 million for a film; she ranked seventh. "AskMen" also named her the number one most desirable woman of 2003. For her role of Swedish actress and singer Britt Ekland in the 2004 HBO film "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers", Theron garnered Golden Globe Award and Primetime Emmy Award nominations. In 2005, she portrayed Rita, the mentally challenged love interest of Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman), on the third season of Fox's television series "Arrested Development", and starred in the financially unsuccessful science fiction thriller "Aeon Flux"; for her voice-over work in the "Aeon Flux" video game, she received a Spike Video Game Award for Best Performance by a Human Female. In the critically acclaimed drama "North Country" (2005), Theron portrayed a single mother and an iron mine worker experiencing sexual harassment. David Rooney of "Variety" wrote: "The film represents a confident next step for lead Charlize Theron.