HALLE
BERRY BIOGRAPHY
We just can't help it, can we? We all have an innate suspicion of
models who become actors. We immediately feel that, otherwise
talentless, they've been cast on their looks alone, that they have no
real right to inhabit our screens. Whenever someone tries it, the
jeers begin and those terrible four words are uttered: Cindy,
Crawford, Fair and Game. Yet Halle Berry, a former model and, worse
still, a Beauty Pageant winner, has risen above all that. Through a
combination of the usual luck and, above all, hard work and
persistence, she's made herself into a fine actress, an Emmy winner
and the most welcome Oscar winner in recent years. And it has not been
easy...
Halle Maria Berry was born on the 14th of August, 1968 (though some
insist it was 1966), in Cleveland, Ohio. She was named after the
town's Halle Building, which originally housed the Halle Brothers
department store but is now an office block (it's also used in the
Drew Carey Show). Her father, Jerome, an African American and a
hospital attendant by trade, left when she was just four, so she and
her elder sister Heidi were raised by their Caucasian mother, Judith,
herself a nurse in a psychiatric ward. Jerome would return after four
years but the violence he directed towards Judith and Heidi meant that
he did not stay for long. Today, Halle has no contact with him at all.
Halle's first few years were spent in a black neighbourhood of
Cleveland. Here her fair complexion made her stand out, but not as
much as she did when her mother moved them out of the inner-city to a
mainly white suburb. Now, a little older and in this conservative
milieu, her "difference" was not so readily tolerated. "I'm black,"
she said later. "I realised very early in my life that I wasn't going
to be this mulatto stuck in the middle, not knowing if I'm black or
white".
To overcome these racial difficulties, Halle threw herself into school
activities at Bedford High and tried to make friends. She did well.
She was in the Honour Society, a cheerleader, class president, and an
editor on the school newspaper. And, naturally, she was Prom Queen. At
least, she was joint Prom Queen. Having won outright, she was accused
of voting irregularities and (guess what?) forced to share her title
with a WASP.
Elsewhere, she was a clear winner. Her looks drew her towards beauty
contests and, by 1983, she was Miss Teen Ohio. From here she became
Miss Teen All-American, and Miss Ohio, then was runner-up in the Miss
USA contest, a placing that saw her entered into the Miss World
competition - she was the first African-American to do so. She didn't
win, but she did make enough money from modelling to return to
Cleveland and enrol at the Cuyahoga Community College where she
studied broadcast journalism.