HALLE BERRY BIOGRAPHY
 

Things were really looking up, career-wise, and in her love-life, too. Halle has had an extraordinarily bad time in relationships. She's lost some of the hearing in one ear due to physical abuse, and another fellow she dumped became something of a stalker, plaguing her for years afterwards and even sending her dead snakes in the post. In January 1993, this looked to be changing when she married Atlanta Braves right fielder David Justice (now of the Yankees), to whom she'd proposed after just six months. They became a pin-up couple, with magazines cooing over their relationship. Sadly, it did not last. They divorced amidst vicious acrimony in 1996. Halle threw herself into work, on screen and for charities. She toiled for the National Breast Cancer Coalition and visited US troops in Sarajevo, later being given an award by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

Determined not to be viewed as mere eye candy, Halle now took the lead in the TV miniseries Queen by Roots-writer Alex Haley. Here she played the title role in the true story of Haley's own grandmother, as she struggled on the tobacco plantations in the days immediately prior to the end of slavery. Fathered by a white slave master, Queen struggles to understand her own identity and to find love in a harsh world. Co-starring Ann-Margret, Martin Sheen and Danny Glover, the show was an epic and a great success.

After this came Father Hood, where Patrick Swayze played a crook on the run with his two kids who've broken out of a foster-shelter where they've been abused. Halle played a journalist trying to track them down and thus uncover the corruption in the foster system. The movie was disappointing, but it showed once again how Halle was keen to deal with serious subject matter. And this was the case too with The Program, about the awful pressures placed on college football-players. The film became notorious for one scene where a boy, unable to take any more, calmly lies down before onrushing traffic. There were several copy-cat fatalities, so Disney pulled the movie and removed the offending scene.

Having taken a far lighter role as sexy secretary Sharon Stone in The Flintstones, Halle then moved on to even heavier material than The Program. In Losing Isaiah, she was once again a crack addict, this time dumping her own baby in a dustbin. A few years later, now cleaned up, she finds that her child is alive and has been fostered by social worker Jessica Lange. A court battle ensues, with Berry aided by lawyer Samuel Jackson.

For a couple of years, her career went downhill - probably due to the savage break-up of her marriage and the ensuing press furore. She was the Queen of Sheba to Jimmy Smits' Solomon in a TV remake of the Yul Brynner/Gina Lollobrigida classic. Then there was an unimportant (read Female) part in the Kurt Russell/Steven Seagal roustabout Executive Decision, about terrorists seizing an aircraft. Next there was The Rich Man's Wife, a poor noir thriller where she played an unhappy spouse who tells stranger Clive Owen she wishes her husband were dead. When he soon is, she begins to fear that she's set something terrible in motion. Worse still was BAPs where she played one of two desperately tacky Southern waitresses who, hoping to launch their own restaurant-come-hairdressers, seek their fortune in LA where Berry winds up trying to kid millionaire Martin Landau that she's his former lover's grand-daughter. Meanwhile, Landau's butler teaches her and her friend how to be ladies. Doesn't sound very promising, does it? No.