Halle Berry

BY: Howard Karren

It was a moment ripe for parody, because the emotions were so intense—Halle Berry even parodied it herself when she picked up a “Razzie” for her starring role in the stinker Catwoman. But when Berry walked onto that stage to accept the Academy Award for Best Actress of 2001 for her performance in the tragic melodrama, Monster’s Ball, the shock of history was channeling through her. “This moment,” she said, between spasms of tears, “is so much bigger than me.” And it was: After 74 years of Academy Awards, Berry was the first woman of color to win Best Actress. Only six before her were nominated, beginning in 1954 with Dorothy Dandridge, whom Berry had played in a 1999 TV biography. Hattie McDaniel (in Gone With the Wind) and Whoopi Goldberg (in Ghost) had nabbed Best Supporting Actress wins, but in taking the big prize, the mixed-race beauty-pageant princess from Cleveland, Ohio, who had worked her way up the Hollywood ranks after playing a bit part as a crack ho in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, modestly recognized that the overwhelming importance of her win was that “this door has now been opened.” And sadly, despite that crossed threshold, no other woman of color has won it since.

Berry herself has not experienced another such career high, though she has certainly led the glamorous—and sometimes sensational—life of a movie star. She is, in curious ways, her generation’s Liz Taylor. She’s had a number of tabloid-worthy, short-lived marriages and affairs (and now two kids), and she’s been an omnipresent fashion icon, through her contract with Revlon and numerous modeling gigs. She played a hot babe in The Flintstones, in the action movie Swordfish (baring her breasts), and in the Bond film Die Another Day. In four X-Men movies she embodied the mutant superhero, Storm, and she played six different (yet mysteriously linked) characters in the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas. She was a terrific match for Warren Beatty in Bulworth. But no role has allowed her to express her paradoxical strength and fragility, and her troubled history with violent men, as perfectly as Monster’s Ball. Berry has such flawless coffee-colored skin, such gorgeous curves and such a sleek and lissome figure, even has she turns 50 this year she seems ageless. And we’re quite sure she has some magnificent onscreen work to come.