[dropcap]H[/dropcap]alle Berry’s full name at birth was Maria Halle Berry which at the age of 5 was changed to Halle Maria Berry. She was born on 14th August, 1966 in Cleveland Ohio. After Berry finished her studies at the Bedford High School, she went on to work at the Higbee’s Departmental Store. She later went on to study at a Cuyahoga Community College.
Halle Berry was once married to David Justice; a well-known baseball player and Eric Benet; a well-known singer and song writer. She is now married to Oliver Martinez and has a daughter from this marriage. She also has a son with a male model.
Halle Berry first stepped in to the spotlight in the 1980s when she took part in a variety of beauty pageants. She was crowned Miss Teen All American, Miss Ohio and was awarded the runners up positioning the Miss USA competition. In this pageant she answered her interview question by telling the world that she hoped to be a world class entertainer one day. In 1986 she became the first woman of an African-American origin to enter Miss World.
She then got the motivation she needed to pursue her lifelong ambitions and went to Chicago to try her luck at modeling. She later moved to New York City in 1989 to work as an actress. She soon ran out of her savings and had to live in a shelter for homeless people. There she came face to face with one of the worst times of her life, she was surrounded by optimism. Having lost so much on the road to achieve her dream, she did not call it quits but renewed her search for an acting job even more vigorously.
She is living proof that luck can turn around with a bit of hard work and dedication. Later in the same year, she did get lucky and landed the role of Emily Franklin in the series Living Dolls. But this was not the end of her hardships. While she was filming for this movie, she went in to a coma and was told she had Type 2 Diabetes, soon this show got cancelled. Just like before she did not let this obstacle dissuade her from the dreams she had. Instead with renewed hope she shifted to Los Angeles and landed a role as a recurring appearance in the serial Knots Landing proving again that things can change their course for the better if only you try really hard.
Her debut film was Jungle Fever in 1991 and in the same year she strictly co-starred in Business. But she swept the public away by her Academy award winning performance in Monster’s Ball. She was an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for the best Actress for her role in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and she was the only woman from an African-American Origin who had ever won an Oscar for a lead position. During the early years of 2000 millennia, she was one of the highest paid actresses. Berry is also a brand ambassador/ model for Revlon.
