London : Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron was quite impressed with her Irish boyfriend Stuart Townsend's first movie script.

Theron reveals Townsend wrote the screenplay for "Battle in Seattle" and suffered the rejections when he attempted to shop his script around Hollywood.

"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 to 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," contactmusic.com quoted her as saying.

She added: "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 his work that she insisted on taking a lead role, opposite Ray Liotta, Andre Benjamin, Woody Harrelson and Michelle Rodriguez.