MY LIFE IN 10 PICTURES
Look back at Halle Berry’s storied Hollywood career.
“Nothing will shake me to the point where I crumble… and I used to crumble, I used to be afraid.”
— Halle
RAISED WITH her sister by a single mom in the suburbs of Cleveland, Maria Halle Berry “always had a feeling of not being enough and that came from my father leaving. I really suffered from low selfesteem for many years.” She worked hard in high school to be “Ms. Everything” and eventually entered beauty pageants where “everybody tried to make believe that [beauty] was the best thing about me. Then I realized no, that’s not the best thing about me, that could all be taken away tomorrow and I’d still have all the gifts that I have on the inside.” Over the years, her talent won her an Emmy and Oscar. Now Halle, who turns 53 on Aug. 14, feels she can do anything, including being a single mom to her own two children. “I’m not perfect, I’m not without flaws and I’ll never be, but I’m confident in who I am and that comes with age.”
1 1989 LIVING NIGHTMARE The Who’s the Boss? spinoff Living Dolls may have been a big break, but it wasn’t a lucky one. “I fell ill dramatically when I was [on the show]. One day, I simply passed out, and I didn’t wake up for seven days.” Halle ended up being diagnosed with diabetes. “I was scared to death; I thought I was going to die.”
2 1991 FEVER PITCH “It was intentional to not play the gorgeous girl,” said Halle of her film debut as “the crack ho” in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever.
“I came from the world of beauty pageants and modeling…. When people heard that, I got discounted as an actor. So, I had the job of trying to eliminate that part of my persona, and Spike gave me a chance to do that.”
3 1993 QUEEN BE “I was not acting a character. I was reenacting a part of history,” insisted Halle of playing the titular freed slave in the miniseries Queen. “For me being interracial myself, it hit me harder… because I realized that, had I been born 100 years ago, this could be my story. Queen’s life could have been my life. And that was horrifying.”
4 1999 AWE-INSPIRING “I was in awe of her beauty, her talent, her charisma,” shared Halle of her Emmy-winning turn in the biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. “She walked through the back doors so that I can go through the front doors.”
5 2000 UNSUNG HERO She’d play the X-Men’s superheroic Storm in four movies, but to Halle, “my hero has always been my mother. She was a single mom raising two little kids. She happened to be white and raising two little black kids in the ’60s and so she was often an outcast. But she did it with such strength and grace.”
6 2002 HAVING A BALL “This moment is so much bigger than me,” Halle said when she became the first black woman to win the Oscar for best actress. Yet the night is a little blurry for the Monster’s Ball star. “I don’t remember any of it, none of it. Very shortly after I got that statue, I became inebriated to the point where the whole night is a wash.”
7 2002 BAD DAY The title of the 007 pic Die Another Day became a tad too literal when during her love scene with Pierce Brosnan “a piece of the fig lodged in my throat and I’m getting no air. Pierce said he knew I was choking. [So he] jumped behind me and did the Heimlich maneuver.”
8 2004 NINE LIVES “Critics bashed it,” explained Halle about her box-office bomb Catwoman. “But people come up to me now and say, ‘I don’t care what anybody says, I liked Catwoman.’ Nobody ever says, ‘I really loved Monster’s Ball.’ Nobody. No. Body. Nobody!”
9 2014 BORN TO IT While she’s not “an astronaut or scientist — far, far from it,” Halle did connect with her character on TV’s Extant because of “her struggle to not only find time for herself [but] also to be a good mother. That’s the struggle that I have struggled with since my kids were born.”
10 2019 DOGGONE IT After being “really lit up” by the first two pics, Halle couldn’t wait to be in John Wick: Chapter 3…or take home lessons from her dog training on the pic. “I have these killer Labradoodles now. I mean, I don’t know if they’re going to go for the b---s, but they could really attack somebody.”