Halle Berry

Halle Berry was the youngest daughter born to Jerome and Judith Berry, an interracial couple. Halle, and her older sister Heidi, spent the first few years of their childhood living in an inner-city neighborhood. In the early 1970s, Jerome Berry abandoned his wife and children, after which Judith moved her family to the predominantly white Cleveland suburb of Bedford.

Halle Berry attended a nearly all-white public school, and as a result was subjected to discrimination at an early age. Her early bouts with racism greatly influenced her desire to excel. Throughout high school, the determined teen participated in a dizzying array of extracurricular activities, holding positions of newspaper editor, class president, and head cheerleader.

A natural performer, Berry earned a handful of beauty pageant titles during the early 1980s, including Miss Teen Ohio and Miss Teen America. She was eventually awarded first runner-up in the 1985 Miss U.S.A. competition. For a short time she attended Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College, where she studied broadcast journalism. However, Berry abandoned her idea of a career in news reporting before receiving her degree. Choosing to wholeheartedly devote her time to a career in entertainment, Berry moved to Chicago then New York City, where she found work as a catalog model.

As the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, the aspiring actress began a career in television with a role on the short-lived sitcom Living Dolls (1989), followed by a year-long run on the CBS prime-time drama Knot’s Landing, in 1991. Berry’s first big-screen break came later that year when she was cast as Samuel L. Jackson’s drug-addicted girlfriend in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever. More substantial supporting roles followed, including that of a stripper in the action-thriller The Last Boy Scout (1991), starring Bruce Willis; and as the woman who finally wins Eddie Murphy’s heart in the romantic comedy Boomerang (1992).

With a few films under her belt, Halle Berry accepted more offbeat roles, making cameos in the rockumentary CB4 (1993), which traced the rise and fall of the titled rap group. 1994’s live-action version of The Flintstones featured Berry as a Stone Age seductress.

Berry offered a no-holds-barred performance as a rehabilitated crack addict seeking to regain custody of her son in Losing Isaiah (1995). In the midst of a bitter custody battle with adoptive parents played by Jessica Lange and David Strathairn, Berry was noted for her believable portrayal in the unglamorous role. Later that year, Halle Berry overcame Hollywood’s racial barriers when she was cast as the first African-American to play the Queen of Sheeba in Showtime’s movie Solomon & Sheeba.

Berry’s other credits included two 1996 crime thrillers — The Rich Man’s Wife, and Executive Decision, which marked her first leading role in a feature. She took a turn as one of three wives laying claim to Frankie Lyman’s estate in the 1998 biographical drama Why Do Fools Fall in Love, and played a liberal urban youth in the political satire Bulworth (1998), opposite Hollywood veteran Warren Beatty.