Halle Berry proves that life begins at 40-plus

The first black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, a Bond girl at 36, mother at 41, voted the ‘sexiest woman alive’ at 42 – we salute Halle Berry, who has defied all prejudices to become a major Hollywood player. Now, to seal her superstar status, she has had a fragrance named after her. But life hasn’t always been so rosy for this human comet - reports the Daily Mail.

There’s no better backdrop for the fine-boned beauty of Halle Berry than the eternal sunshine of an LA day. And as the first (and, so far, only) black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar, she has earned a blissful bask in that sun.

Yet when I meet Halle, the human comet who conquered Hollywood, I’m amazed at how down-to-earth she is. After joining the ranks of the A-listers with her Academy Award for Monster’s Ball in 2001, this multi-achiever then showed she really could have it all by giving birth to her first child, daughter Nahla, in March last year at the relatively advanced age of 41. It was, she said at the time, something she ‘had wanted for so long’. Yet I can see in her eyes that she still takes nothing for granted.



Given Halle’s status, she’s unusually forthright and informal. But the fabulous shots of a slinky Halle in her glamorous new perfume campaign for Coty – she’s launching her own fragrance Halle by Halle Berry – come as no surprise, since she was crowned the Sexiest Woman Alive by Esquire magazine only last October at the age of 42.

Yet she cheerfully sent up those good looks at the time. As she explains, ‘I think those things are kind of silly because nobody is the sexiest anything, so I asked them to let me write my own article to poke fun at the label. What I thought was interesting about them choosing me was that I had just had a baby, so it was all about saying that motherhood can be sexy – that was the important thing.

'And I do feel sexier because I’m now more in line with my purpose for being on the planet. When you feel empowered, to me that’s sexy.’

As for being an older mother, if anyone can change Hollywood’s ageism as well as its sexism and racism, then this former beauty queen and current face of Revlon can. She even disclosed in the same Esquire piece that sex was better now she was older; as she playfully said, ‘I have much better orgasms than when I was 22 because I know what I like – and I initiate.’

Despite her new-found confidence, there’s something very human about Halle, who followed up her Oscar with a Worst Actress Razzie award in 2005 for Catwoman (she doesn’t do anything by halves) and, sportingly, became the first actress to show up in person to accept it, saying her mother had always taught her to be a good loser.

She has been fallible in another way, too: in 2000 she was given three years’ probation and 200 hours of community service for leaving the scene of a traffic accident after crashing into another car on Sunset Boulevard (she had to have 20 stitches to a gashed head, while the other driver broke her wrist). Yet Halle’s successes far outnumber the mistakes.

Named after the department store Halle Brothers in her home town of Cleveland, Ohio, Halle was dubbed ‘Zebra’ by local bullies because of her mixed race. Yet her beauty also set her apart, and modelling became her stepping stone to TV acting, before her breakthrough on the big screen as a crack addict in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever in 1991.

She followed that up with showy roles as the sexy mutant Storm in the X-Men series, Bond girl Jinx in Die Another Day and the wife of an executed murderer in Monster’s Ball – shocking blacks and whites alike with her graphic nude love scene with Billy Bob Thornton’s racist character. Such has been her impact on Hollywood that no wonder her website is punningly named Hallewood.com.

But her journey on the way up couldn’t have been tougher. Halle was raised by her white Liverpool-born mother Judith after her black American father Jerome had walked out on her, Halle and her sister Heidi – who is two years older – when Halle was only four. Worse was to come, however, for Jerome, who is now dead, drifted back to beat up Judith and Heidi.

As Halle once admitted, ‘My father was an alcoholic and pretty violent, and my formative years were filled with turmoil and abuse.’

Although, as the youngest in the family, she escaped the physical attacks (later agonising about her guilt at this), she could not escape the emotional scars that badly affected her relationships with men – until she met her current partner Gabriel Aubry, the father of Nahla.

Halle has two broken marriages behind her: to baseball player David Justice from 1992 to 1997 and to musician Eric Benét from 2001 to 2005. She even contemplated suicide after her divorce from Benét but couldn’t bear the thought of her beloved mother finding the body.

A fight with a boyfriend in the early 90s had also left her with some hearing loss in one ear. Yet that dysfunctional relationship history came to an end when she worked with Gabriel, a French-Canadian model ten years her junior, on a fashion shoot in Montreal in 2005

As she tells me, ‘We clicked instantly. And yes, he’s not at all bad on the eyes,’ she adds, giggling. ‘I don’t know if younger men are easier to get on with because they’re not so set in their ways; all I know is that he’s easy for me to get along with.’

Yet although Nahla has been given Gabriel’s surname, Halle remains adamant that she will never tie the knot again. Clearly she’s a case of twice divorced, three times shy.

And when I ask her for the key to a perfect relationship, she laughs ruefully and sighs before replying: ‘I’m so not the relationship go-to girl. But I’m much clearer about what a relationship is, which is why I will never marry again. Gabriel and I have a great partnership and a lovely daughter. But I once was stupid enough to say, in a previous relationship, “I’m going to be with this person for ever,” and realised, as I grew, that I don’t know if for ever is possible.

'Gabriel and I don’t look at our relationship in terms of for ever, we look at it as right here today. And today means being the best people we can be, the best parents we can be. It’s wonderful, but neither one of us feels the need to attach ourselves to each other for life – because it may not be that.’

If not a husband, then Gabriel certainly sounds like the perfect father. ‘When I’m not filming, I’m pretty hands-on with Nahla, and so is Gabriel; so much so that he’s my nanny – that’s what I tell him,’ she says, laughing. ‘I’m just kidding. But we work together so well on the childcare.’



Nahla, she proudly tells me, is African for loved one and Arabic for honey bee. The little girl is Judith’s sixth grandchild, since Halle’s older sister Heidi plunged into motherhood much earlier and now has five children.

‘But motherhood will always be my priority now, especially because I had a child for the first time at 41,’ says Halle. ‘My priority had been myself for a long, long time, but now it will always be Nahla. You think you know what love is – until you have a child and discover that unconditional mother love.’

Nevertheless, Halle is insistent that she won’t give up making movies in favour of full-time motherhood. ‘I believe that in order to be a good parent, I’ve got to be happy myself, and making movies is my form of expression – so I will find a way to balance the two,’ she says.

She clearly relishes a challenge, for the actress has just finished filming the role of a woman with a multiple personality disorder in Frankie and Alice and is considering playing an infertile mother who discovers the surrogate she has chosen to bear her baby is clinically insane in director Paul Verhoeven’s upcoming project The Surrogate.

Halle now has so much clout in Hollywood that she was able to hand-pick British director Geoffrey Sax for Frankie and Alice after she had seen his work on the BBC1 lesbian love story Tipping the Velvet.

Her next film shoot will be Nappily Ever After, a romcom about a broody woman finding herself late in life. Although the part requires Halle to shave her head for a hairdressing horror scene, she coolly claims to be ‘really excited’ at the prospect (and has the bone structure to carry it off).

Age, it seems, has brought a new confidence to Halle, who will be 43 on 14 August. ‘As a mature woman, you are no longer trying to prove yourself,’ she explains. ‘You pretty much have figured out who you are. And I feel the right to do and say and be whatever I want. I don’t have to make excuses. And I’m no longer so ambitious that I spend every waking moment trying to be something I’m not, which I did in my youth.’

When I ask if younger men continue to make passes at her, she giggles and shyly admits, ‘Sure, men will be men.’

So secure is Halle now that it was she who took the initiative in launching her first signature perfume, aptly named Halle by Halle Berry, which contains her favourite sensual ingredients of mimosa and fig. There were few luxuries when Halle was growing up, as her mother worked as a modestly paid psychiatric nurse, but perfume was one of them and played its part in building her self-esteem.

‘As a teenager, I learned that the scent you wore kind of defined who you were and said a lot about you,’ Halle recalls. ‘I used to mix my mother’s Chanel and Estée Lauder, and I’ve been mixing my own ever since. My partner is a Frenchman so I’ve got to smell right,’ she adds playfully. ‘Gabriel loves the perfume – he was my chief tester.’

Asked if she felt flattered to be approached for the campaign in such an ageist beauty industry, she admits, ‘Coty didn’t approach me – I approached them! I was pregnant and knew I wouldn’t be able to make any movies for a while. So I thought, “Now’s the time to create my own fragrance,” because I had wanted to do one for a long time. And luckily Coty said yes.’

Lucky for Coty, too, since the campaign photos of Halle in the sea, smiling seductively over one bare brown shoulder, irresistibly evoke her famous Venus-rising-from-the-waves scene in the Bond film Die Another Day. She looks terrific, and tells me that breast-feeding is her tip for regaining your figure after giving birth.

’It’s the absolute right thing to do for your baby – and the right thing to do for your body,’ says Halle, who admits she would like another child. ‘I’m certainly open to having another, so I hope so.’

So where next for Halle? Having reached the top, it’s tempting to assume she won’t have to fight prejudice again; but Halle is realistic. ‘Some people will still define me by my race,’ she admits. ‘But I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything if I didn’t feel positive that things will continue to change.

'Now that Barack Obama is president, hopefully more people of colour will find equality at all levels of life. My daughter’s world will be indelibly different to my world, and that’s evolution. Twenty years ago, when I started in this business, it wasn’t like this at all. I’m happy to have been around to be a part of it.’

But Halle hasn’t forgotten the struggles along the way. Tellingly, her ambition is to play Angela Davis, the black political activist and academic who became an icon of the civil rights movement during the 1970s and the third woman in history to appear on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

‘She’s a fascinating woman, and I love the idea of playing her. But I would only do so if I could get her consent,’ she says.

All hail Halle. If anyone can pull it off, she can.

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