Halle Berry One Best Hollywood Actress

10/08/2008

Halle Berry could have made a career off her otherworldly good looks. Instead, she dug deep and turned out some of the most emotionally raw performances Hollywood has ever seen

This month Elle Magazine is featuring Halle Berry as part of our “Women in Hollywood” story.

ELLE: Name one actress peer you admire.
Halle Berry: Kate Winslet is always naked, sitting on a toilet, running buck-naked. She’s free. I want to be the kind of actress who can really be comfortable with my body like that.

ELLE: Was Dorothy Dandridge a role model for you?
Halle Berry: I feel like we remember Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. And Dorothy Dandridge was right on a par with them. But she was a black woman trying to make it in an industry where there was no place for her. I think I’ve always felt that way. I’ve tried to carve out my own niche, because there was no one before me who went as far as I was dreaming of going.

ELLE: In Things We Lost in the Fire, you play a black woman married to a white man and nothing is made of that. For a woman of color in Hollywood, is that progress?
Halle Berry: Absolutely. And that part was very normal for me, being raised by a white mother. Only when I got to junior high did it become something I had to defend or explain or even think about. Now with a black man running for president, I think we’re moving toward this great racial divide becoming a thing of the past. If I don’t fully experience that in my lifetime, I really believe my daughter will.

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