Saturday 27 October 2012

Halle Berry is spooked by giant spider on Ellen DeGeneres' show


It's behind you! Halle Berry is spooked by giant spider on Ellen DeGeneres' show


    Ellen DeGeneres loves nothing more than to wind up her A-list victims, er sorry... interviewees.
But she upped the ante with Halle Berry, who just revealed that an infestation of black widow spiders has taken over her home.
Scroll down to watch Halle get spooked...
Halloween comes early: Halle Berry got the fright of her life when Ellen spooked her with a man dressed as a black widow spider
Halloween comes early: Halle Berry got the fright of her life when Ellen spooked her with a man dressed as a black widow spider
The Cloud Atlas actress, 46, told DeGeneres that her gardener found a 'colony' of eight-legged creatures living under one of her lawn chairs and said she immediately left her home.
'I just left,' Berry said. 'Before I passed out I said 'I'm going to leave and you're going to have to handle that.'
'Because I can't stand spiders. I don't even like daddy long-legs.'
Obviously, given Ellen's penchant for pranks... this was a bad idea.
Seeing the funny side: Halle laughed off the prank, which was probably a relief for the poor schmuck in the spider suit
Seeing the funny side: Halle laughed off the prank, which was probably a relief for the poor schmuck in the spider suit
No idea: Halle was caught by surprise after admitting her weakness
No idea: Halle was caught by surprise after admitting her weakness
After the commercial break, the talk show host had a man in a spider costume sneak up on Berry and give her the fright of her life.
'That was so mean!' Berry told DeGeneres, laughing manically.
'I'm so sorry I talked about the spiders.'
Berry revealed she is dressing up as something a lot more palatable to escort her 4-year-old daughter Nahla trick or treating -  a giant cupcake.
Clenched teeth: Halle laughed but looked pretty shaken
Clenched teeth: Halle laughed but looked pretty shaken
Nahla is going to a Lalaloopsy doll.
'The things we do for our children. I love her so much that's why I’m going,' she explained.
'It’s this big huge thing [cupcake costume] and I’m going to be like waddling down the street.'




Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2224079/Its-Halle-Berry-spooked-giant-spider-Ellen-DeGeneres-show.html#ixzz2AXOcNfcu
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Thursday 25 October 2012

Halle on the cover of two Interview magazines - Germany and Russia


Guess Which A-Lister Is Unrecognisable On The Cover Of Interview Magazine?


Who is this bronzed beauty playing cover girl for the November issue of Interview Magazine? It took us a while, but after a few guesses and a closer gawp...
hal
The long lashes, sultry eyes and general immaculate complexion confirmed it: Halle Berry. Yep, it's definitely her.



Well Played! Halle Berry Reinvents Herself For Interview Magazine Germany

  • Libby Banks
  • Editor of MyDaily and The Huffington Post Style UK
Who? Halle Berry
What?
It's two for the price of one when it comes to the former Bond girl and Interview magazine. After gawping at the actress' cover for the Russian edition, we're now transfixed by her shoot and cover for Interview Germany. While the cover is proper misty-focus 1970s style (think David Bailey photographs of Marie Helvin), things are brought right back to 2012 with Halle Berry's apparent homage to Lady Gaga. The most surprising thing? The mega platforms, power shoulders and panther sunglasses actually work.
Where? Interview magazine, Germany.
halle final
cover_int_de11_rgb
Thoughts on the shoot? Let us know below...

Exciting Halle Berry Fragrance Competition coming soon on this blog








Bags of happiness! Halle Berry matches her shirt to her smile


Bags of happiness! Halle Berry matches her shirt to her smile as she lugs her grocery shopping to the car



For many people grocery shopping is a chore they could do without.
But Halle Berry appeared to be in good spirits as she carried out the mundane task on Wednesday.
The 46-year-old was spotted emerging from a Bristol Farms supermarket in West Hollywood with a content smile on her face.
Good spirits: Halle Berry was in a pleasant mood as she carried out grocery bags from a supermarket on Wednesday
Good spirits: Halle Berry was in a pleasant mood as she carried out grocery bags from a supermarket on Wednesday
As if her facial expression wasn’t a tell-tale sign of her joy, the actress wore a top which reflected her mood.
    She donned the grey long-sleeve number with the word ‘Happy’ in a large bold font, followed by the words ‘is the new black’ scribbled on with white writing.
    The design was accompanied by a stitched on smiley face and the star wore it with an ebony maxi skirt.
    Fashion statement: The actress wore a top reading 'Happy Is The New Black' during the outing in West Hollywood
    Fashion statement: The actress wore a top reading 'Happy Is The New Black' during the outing in West Hollywood
    Fashion statement: The actress wore a top reading 'Happy Is The New Black' during the outing in West Hollywood 
    She teamed the items with sandals and aviator sunglasses as she walked through the parking lot to carry her plastic bag s back to her car.
    The pixie-haired beauty – who is engaged to actor Olivier Martinez - was looking happy pleased despite her current custody battle with ex-partner Gabriel Aubry.
    Halle is believed to be waiting to discover if she can get their four-year-old daughter to live with her in France along with Martinez.
    Styled for the shops: The pixie-haired star teamed the look with a black maxi skirt, aviator sunglasses and sandals
    Styled for the shops: The pixie-haired star teamed the look with a black maxi skirt, aviator sunglasses and sandals
    According to TMZ, the judge in the star's custody case is ready to rule on her request to take her daughter Nahla to Paris permanently.
    Sources tell the website that both Halle and Gabriel's lawyers have closed their cases and are waiting for the judge's decision.
    The former couple may also appear in court as the judge has apparently said that he doesn't want to send a written decision to the pair's respective lawyers.
    Custody drama: She was in a good mood despite her current battle to take daughter Nahla to live with her and Olivier Martinez in France
    Custody drama: She was in a good mood despite her current battle to take daughter Nahla to live with her and Olivier Martinez in France
    Custody drama: She was in a good mood despite her current battle to take daughter Nahla to live with her and Olivier Martinez in France


    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2222796/Halle-Berry-wears-mood-clothes-goes-grocery-shopping.html#ixzz2AImh3OGV
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    Tuesday 23 October 2012

    Pictured: Halle Berry's jaw-dropping close encounter with great white sharks


    Pictured: Halle Berry's jaw-dropping close encounter with great white sharks


    It seems Halle Berry loves to live dangerously. 
    The actress, 46, is seen having close encounters with great white sharks in behind the scenes footage of her movie Dark Tide. 
    The mother-of-one is pictured reaching out to the ocean predators while leaning over on the edge of a boat and she even got to touch one in the wild. 
    Scroll down for video...
    Getting close to nature: Halle Berry reaches out to touch a great white shark in behind-the-scenes footage for her film Dark Tide
    Getting close to nature: Halle Berry reaches out to touch a great white shark in behind-the-scenes footage for her film Dark Tide
    Incredible: Halle's encounters feature in behind-the-scenes footage of Dark Tide
    Incredible: Halle's encounters feature in behind-the-scenes footage of Dark Tide
    My what big teeth you have! Halle wasn't put off by the fearsome great white
    My what big teeth you have! Halle wasn't put off by the fearsome great white
    On edge: The star filmed on Seal Island, False Bay in South Africa
    On edge: The star filmed on Seal Island, False Bay in South Africa
    'Apparently, I’m one of the very few people who have done that,' she has said. 'How did I manage it? Very carefully,’ 
    Halle, who filmed the thriller in Seal Island, False Bay in South Africa, stars as diving instructor Sara, who faces the difficult decision of getting back into the water following a near-fatal great white shark attack.
    She also swam with sharks for the part, but insists she never put herself in harm's way.
    Living dangerously: Halle leaned over the edge of a boat
    Living dangerously: Halle leaned over the edge of a boat
    Brave move: The star said she was one of the few people in the world to have touched a great white in the wild
    Brave move: The star said she was one of the few people in the world to have touched a great white in the wild
    ‘I got into the same water as the sharks. Was I scared? Yes. But I never put myself in harm’s way because I’m a mother and there are certain things I just would not do any more.
    'I spent some time with a man known as the shark whisperer; my character is modelled on him. 
    'He has studied sharks for a couple of decades and swims with them – with nothing to protect him but a stick – so studying with him for a couple of weeks taught me how to interact with one.'
    VIDEO: Halle Berry's jaw-dropping close encounter with great white sharks 

    Animal magnetism: The star plays a 'shark whisperer' in the movie
    Animal magnetism: The star plays a 'shark whisperer' in the movie
    Finding love: Halle fell for her co-star Olivier Martinez on the set
    Finding love: Halle fell for her co-star Olivier Martinez on the set
    Olivier Martinez plays her old diving partner and ex-husband, Jeff, who convinces her to get back into the water and face her demons.
    The two met and fell in love while filming the action movie in the autumn of 2010 and are now engaged.
    Halle has a daughter Nahla, four, with her ex boyfriend Gabriel Aubry. 
    Dark Tide is out now on DVD and Blu-ray through Revolver Entertainment.
    Back on solid ground: Halle appeared on Jay Leno's show last night to promote her other film, Cloud Atlas
    Back on solid ground: Halle appeared on Jay Leno's show last night to promote her other film, Cloud Atlas


    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2221959/Halle-Berrys-jaw-dropping-close-encounter-great-white-sharks.html#ixzz2AA31Aewa
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    Halle almost re-broke her foot on Cloud Atlas set


    HALLE BERRY ALMOST RE-BROKE FOOT ON CLOUD ATLAS SET

    22nd October 2012
    Actress HALLE BERRY almost re-broke her foot just one day after getting her cast off when she slipped on a wet rock while shooting her new movie CLOUD ATLAS.

    The Oscar winner broke a bone in her foot after she tripped and fell at a house she was renting on location in Majorca, Spain earlier this year (12), requiring her to use a wheelchair to get around.
    As soon as the fracture healed and her cast was removed, Berry was back on set.
    Her co-star Tom Hanks tells the New York Times Style Magazine, "She called it a 'bump in the road.' But this was a severe break. In between takes, she had to be helped to her chair because she couldn't stand up on her own."
    But that didn't keep the 46 year old from giving the film her all and she immediately threw herself into an action sequence - which almost ended disastrously.
    Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski continued, "The first day after she got her cast off her foot she had to do a scene standing on a rock in the middle of a river."
    Berry then slipped on her broken foot and yelled out in pain, but she persevered through the shoot: "This fire ignited in her eyes and she was suddenly (her character) Meronym again. The take was flawless. It's the one in the film. She is one of the gutsiest actors we've ever worked with."

    Halle lets daughter Nahla nap on her shoulder on shopping outing


    A Berry tired girl! Halle lets daughter Nahla nap on her shoulder on shopping outing

    By Mike Larkin
    |
    She no doubt thinks of herself as a big girl now that she's four-years-old.
    But Halle Berry's daughter Nahla could not resist going for an afternoon nap on her mother's shoulder as they went on a shopping excursion together on Friday.
    The Catwoman star put her muscles to good use by carrying the exhausted youngster back to her car while she slept in Hollywood.
    Knackered: Nahla gave a massive yawn as Halle Berry carried her back to the car after a Hollywood shopping trip on Friday
    Knackered: Nahla gave a massive yawn as Halle Berry carried her back to the car after a Hollywood shopping trip on Friday
    The 46-year-old looked more than a little relieved that she could put her rapidly growing daughter down when she finally reached her fancy car after a brief, but challenging, walk.

    Halle looked in fabulous shape in a sleeveless blouse, blue jeans, boots and a fetching Andy Capp-style grey hat.
    Feeling the burn: Even the fit Catwoman star was beginning to feel the strain of carrying the rapidly growing girl
    Feeling the burn: Even the fit Catwoman star was beginning to feel the strain of carrying the rapidly growing girl
    Feeling the burn: Even the fit Catwoman star was beginning to feel the strain of carrying the rapidly growing girl
    Hope the balloon helps: The helium-filled accessory may have taken a little bit of the weight
    Hope the balloon helps: The helium-filled accessory may have taken a little bit of the weight
    The desperate actress is believed to be waiting to discover if she can force the youngster to live with her in France along with her fiancé Olivier Martinez.
    According to TMZ, the judge in the star's custody case is ready to rule on her request to take her daughter Nahla to Paris permanently.
    Sources tell the website that both Halle and Gabriel's lawyers have closed their cases and are waiting for the judge's decision.
    The former couple may also appear in court as the judge has apparently said that he doesn't want to send a written decision to the pair's respective lawyers.
    Thank goodness: Halle was relieved to be able to drop the youngster in her child seat to continue her nap
    Thank goodness: Halle was relieved to be able to drop the youngster in her child seat to continue her nap
    The news comes as Halle has opened up about her plans to move Nahla to France, insisting it is in her daughter's best interests.
    'It's the appeal of privacy and a greater sense of safety for Nahla,' she told InStyle magazine.
    'Because we are followed all the time, she is starting to feel like she is somehow special, and of course she is, but I want her to understand that she's special because of who she is, not because she was born into this celebrity blender.'
    The X Men star also dismissed the concerns her Canadian father Gabrial Aubry has about the move.
    She said: 'There is turbulence, but this too shall pass,' she said.


    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2220527/Halle-Berry-lets-daughter-Nahla-nap-shoulder-shopping-outing.html#ixzz29yufW3MB
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    Monday 22 October 2012

    Halle on US TV


    Thanks to 

    Robirob

    @RobirobC

    for the following schedule:

    10/22/12 HALLE ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA ON ABC
    10/22/12: Jay Leno
    10/25/12: Access Hollywood,
    10/25/12 Chelsea Lately
    10/26/12: Hollywood Dailies,

    10/26/12 Mark At The Movies,
    10/26/12 Ellen,
    10/26/12 Jimmy Kimmel
    10/29/12: Wendy Williams

    Halle Reveals Why She Has Such Bad Luck With Men - The Inquisitr -


    Halle Berry Reveals Why She Has Such Bad Luck With Men

    Posted: October 20, 2012
    Halle Berry discusses her failed relationships
    Halle Berry recently opened up about her past failed relationships with men. The 46-year-old actress and mother admitted that “her picker’s broken” when it comes to selecting a mate.

    Berry has been involved in several high-profile relationships. Her four-year marriage to baseball player David Justice resulted in a suicide attempt, her second husband Eric Benet admitted to cheating on her repeatedly, and she’s currently embroiled in a custody battle with the father of daughter, Nahla, Gabriel Aubry, reports Yahoo! News.In an interview with T, The New York Times Style Magazine, Berry talks about her career, recognition, and upcoming role in Cloud Atlas. She also talks about why she seems to have such bad luck with men, saying, “God just wanted to mix up my life. Maybe he was thinking, ‘This girl can’t get everything! I’m going to give her a broken picker.’ ”
    “Just because they see my face doesn’t mean they see me. A person’s self-esteem has nothing to do with how she looks,” she says, referring to her admitted low self-esteem. “If it’s true that I’m beautiful, I’m proof of that. Self-esteem comes from who you have in your life. How you were raised. What you struggled with as a child.”
    Berry says that much of this comes from being raised by a single mom, and troubles fitting in being bi-racial.
    “My mother tried hard,” Berry says. “But there was no substitute for having a black woman I could identify with, who could teach me about being black.”
    “I always had to prove myself through my actions,”she recalls about being the lone black student in a nearly all-white school. “Be a cheerleader. Be class president. Be the editor of the newspaper. It gave me a way to show who I was without being angry or violent. By the time I left school, I had a lot of tenacity. I’d turned things around.”
    Berry will return from a slight hiatus in Cloud Atlas, but is reluctant to brand it a “comeback.”
    “I never went anywhere,” she says. “I just seized the chance to be in an extraordinary film with an extraordinary cast, exploring an idea that’s relevant to everyone.”
    Also speaking about her engagement to Olivier Martinez, Berry says that her “picker” is apparently “fixed now.”

    Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/370133/halle-berry-reveals-why-she-has-such-bad-luck-with-men/#4t2JPwEZEEje4we1.99

    Sunday 21 October 2012

    Halle Berry 'planning African wedding'


    Halle Berry 'planning African wedding'

    Thursday, 21 June 2012
    Halle Berry
    Halle Berry

    Halle Berry is reportedly planning to tie the knot with fiancé Olivier Martinez later this year in South Africa.
    The couple got engaged in January and Star magazine claims that the couple be walking down the aisle sooner rather than later.
    Halle is currently embroiled in a custody dispute with ex-boyfriend Gabriel Aubry over their four-year-old daughter Nahla but wants to say "I do" once that is over in a very special place.
    "The wedding's going to be in Cape Town, because that's where they met and fell in love," an insider told the publication about the location of their movie Dark Tide.
    "They want to have the ceremony and reception on a huge yacht in False Bay. They're finalising a lot of the details now, like who's going to design the dress."
    The 45-year-old Oscar winner had vowed never to wed again but could not refuse the French actor's proposal.
    "It's obvious to everyone that they have finally found the right one this time," the source said. "It's especially exciting for Olivier, who has never been married before."
    "Olivier doesn't have any children, and he desperately hopes it's not too late for them to have a baby together. Halle wants it to happen too!"
    © Cover Media


    Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/news/halle-berry-planning-african-wedding-16175239.html#ixzz1yQ9Q6OUC

    Halle Berry Covers 'T' Magazine - Article and photos




    Halle Berry Covers 'T' Magazine! - JustJared.com

    Halle Berry Covers 'T' Magazine!
    Halle Berry is gorgeous on the cover of T, The New York Times Style Magazine‘s women’s fashion cover.
    Here’s what the 46-year-old Cloud Atlas actress had to share with the mag:
    On keeping herself grounded: “I always felt like the underdog. Behind the eight ball. I learned not to be too high on the hog. Even that night I won the Oscar, I had a fundamental knowing, it was just a moment in time. Driving home that night, back to my house, I felt like Cinderella. I said, ‘When this night is over, I’m going back to who I was.’ And I did.”
    On perceiving her image growing up: “My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn’t matter as much as how I would be perceived” — as beautiful but also as a black woman in a world in which the images of beautiful, successful black women were notably absent.”
    Tom Hanks, on Halle’s acting ability: “She’s got this way of looking at the camera. Very deep and still. There’s a calm about her, and that comes through in her performances. She’s a peaceful pond on a late summer’s day. No maintenance or hurly-burly.”
    For more from Halle, visit tmagazine.com!



    Halle Berry models every season’s wardrobe essentials: a great jacket and classic denim. Salvatore Ferragamo jacket, $17,300; (800) 628-8916. Isabel Marant shirt, $145; (212) 219-2284. Hermès belt, $2,050; hermes.com. Guess jeans, $98; guess.com. Janis by Janis Savitt necklace, $588, bracelets, $625 and $940, and rings, $125, $150 and $200; (212) 245-7396.Photograph by Cedric Buchet. Styled by Bill Mullen. Fashion assistants: Mauricio Quezada and Mollie Maguire. Hair by Neeko at Dew Beauty Agency and Salon Sessions using Oribe. Makeup by Kara Yoshimoto Bua for Chanel using Revlon. Manicure by Deborah Lippmann.Halle Berry models every season’s wardrobe essentials: a great jacket and classic denim. Salvatore Ferragamo jacket, $17,300; (800) 628-8916. Isabel Marant shirt, $145; (212) 219-2284. Hermès belt, $2,050; hermes.com. Guess jeans, $98; guess.com. Janis by Janis Savitt necklace, $588, bracelets, $625 and $940, and rings, $125, $150 and $200; (212) 245-7396.

    Roles of a lifetime - Halle Berry

    It’s 10 in the morning, and already Halle Berry is being chased, though a better word for what’s going on might be “hunted.” Considering this, the Oscar-winning actress — one of the stars of the film “Cloud Atlas” — makes her way into the lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel as if emerging from savasana at the end of a two-hour yoga class. Her smile appears warm, her outfit (perfectly ripped jeans and a T-shirt) unremarkable. Her hair — back to the short cut she has favored over the years, that only a woman this beautiful could pull off with such success — looks great though un-fussed-over, as does the rest of her, never mind that she just celebrated her 46th birthday. She doesn’t carry herself like a woman under siege.
    “They’re outside my house every morning,” she says. We’re speaking of the paparazzi, of course. Even here in L.A. — a town not short on movie stars — Halle Berry gets special attention from the press. Not the good kind.
    “I get it about the celebrity stuff,” she tells me softly, sliding into her seat. “It’s part of my job to recognize that there’s a certain part of my life the public wants to hear about. But it’s not O.K. that they’re doing terrible things to my daughter. One night, after they chased us, it took me two hours just to get her calmed down enough to get to sleep.”
    Nahla (the name means “gift” in Swahili and “drink of water” in Arabic) is 4, the child of Berry’s five-year relationship with Gabriel Aubry, a French-Canadian model 10 years her junior, from whom she parted (cordially, at first, with vows on both sides of working together as parents, for the good of their child) two and a half years ago. Somewhere along the line, the plan broke down. During the Cape Town filming of “Dark Tide” in 2010, Berry (already separated from Aubry, to whom she was never married) got together with her French co-star, Olivier Martinez, to whom she is now engaged. In June she was ordered to pay Aubry $20,000 a month in child support. Nobody’s pretending they’re friends anymore.
    Berry’s petition for a custody arrangement that would allow her to move to France is currently in the courts, with accusations flying from both sides and experts testifying that the parents should work things out. Meanwhile, the men with cameras stake out Berry’s house every morning and follow her wherever she goes. Including here.
    She and Nahla are just back from the Toronto Film Festival, site of the “Cloud Atlas” premiere, where she saw the film for the first time. Some reviewers compared “Cloud Atlas” to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” called it revolutionary, an artistic masterpiece. Other critics displayed considerably less awe — including one from The Times, who used the word “dopey.”
    In any case, Berry’s role in the movie will surely be termed a comeback. After winning an Oscar for “Monster’s Ball” in 2002, she continued to work almost nonstop until her daughter’s birth in 2008, at age 41, then took two years off. She has made a couple of movies since then, but with “Cloud Atlas” it feels very much as if Berry is back — even if the actress herself doesn’t see it that way. “I never went anywhere,” she says. “I just seized the chance to be in an extraordinary film with an extraordinary cast, exploring an idea that’s relevant to everyone.”
    It is without question her most ambitious role in years. In the film, directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski, who made “The Matrix,” and Tom Tykwer, Berry plays six characters, among them: a 19th-century Maori tribeswoman enslaved on a tobacco plantation; the sexually frustrated wife of a maniacal 1930s German composer; an investigative journalist in 1970s San Francisco, attempting to avert a nuclear-plant disaster; and an otherworldly refugee from a dying tribe in the future on a doomed planet. For that role, Berry needed not simply to look good in a white jumpsuit (she did) but also to speak in an invented dialect with her co-star Tom Hanks. And she had to age around 50 years, believably, with her beauty and sexuality intact.
    “She’s got this way of looking at the camera,” Hanks says. “Very deep and still. There’s a calm about her, and that comes through in her performances. She’s a peaceful pond on a late summer’s day. No maintenance or hurly-burly.”
    No hurly-burly. Except in her private life: a domestic violence episode that left her with an 80 percent hearing loss in one ear. Hit-and-run charges from an accident in 2000. A four-year marriage to the baseball player David Justice, resulting in a breakup that Berry has described as having precipitated thoughts of suicide.
    Her second marriage, to the singer Eric Benét, ended after Benét admitted infidelities and checked into rehab for that old Hollywood standby, sex addiction.
    Last year, a stalker trespassed on Berry’s property three times over the course of as many days. After serving six months in prison, he was ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment and issued a restraining order.
    Now comes the custody struggle with Gabriel Aubry. And, despite her vow, delivered emphatically on Oprah’s couch, in 2004, that she would “never marry again — never,” she is engaged to yet another fabulously handsome performer.
    I have to ask the question: “Why have you made such bad choices in men?”
    “My picker’s broken,” she says with a laugh. “God just wanted to mix up my life. Maybe he was thinking, ‘This girl can’t get everything! I’m going to give her a broken picker.’ ” She says it’s fixed now.
    Berry’s looks are no doubt a great gift. Even now, more than halfway through her 40s, she retains perfect skin, a long, elegant neck and a body that is both slim and womanly. (She says a diagnosis of Type-1 diabetes, at age 19, made healthy eating and exercise a necessity.) But, she says, “just because they see my face doesn’t mean they see me. A person’s self-esteem has nothing to do with how she looks.
    “If it’s true that I’m beautiful,” she adds, “I’m proof of that. Self-esteem comes from who you have in your life. How you were raised. What you struggled with as a child.”
    Berry grew up in Cleveland as the child of a white mother (a psychiatric nurse) and a black, alcoholic father — a hospital orderly — who abused her mother and older sister (not Berry herself, she says), and who left when she was 4. He returned six years later for what she describes as “the worst year of my life.” But it was her mother, Judith, who raised her.
    After her mother showed up for the first time at her all-black elementary school, Berry was shunned. “Kids said I was adopted,” she says. “Overnight, I didn’t fit in anymore.” When the family moved to the suburbs in search of a better education for Berry and her sister, she was suddenly the lone black child in a nearly all-white school. People left Oreo cookies in her locker. When she was elected prom queen, the school principal accused her of stuffing the ballot box and suggested she and the white runner-up flip a coin to see who got to be queen. Berry won the toss.
    “I always had to prove myself through my actions,” she says. “Be a cheerleader. Be class president. Be the editor of the newspaper. It gave me a way to show who I was without being angry or violent. By the time I left school, I had a lot of tenacity. I’d turned things around.”
    When she was 16, her mother stood with her in front of a mirror and asked what she saw. “My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me,” Berry says. “Bloodlines didn’t matter as much as how I would be perceived” — as beautiful but also as a black woman in a world in which the images of beautiful, successful black women were notably absent.
    In the late 1960s, when Berry was a toddler, it wasn’t hard to find a black maid on the screen, large or small. But except for Diahann Carroll, and Nichelle Nichols on “Star Trek,” there were virtually no glamorous black leading ladies on television. Before that, on the large screen there had been Dorothy Dandridge, a serious actress and singer, but one who never came close to achieving the fame or success of her white contemporaries Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe. Among Oscar winners, the only name on the list: Hattie McDaniel, for her role as the maid in “Gone With the Wind.” (And in 1990, Whoopi Goldberg, as Best Supporting Actress in “Ghost.”)
    A similar problem faced her at home. “My mother tried hard,” Berry says. “But there was no substitute for having a black woman I could identify with, who could teach me about being black.”
    A black school counselor named Yvonne Sims entered her life in fifth grade. She remains one of Berry’s closest friends. “Yvonne taught me not to let the criticism affect me. She inspired me to be the best and gave me a model of a great black woman.”
    The model of a good man was harder to come by. Her mother had a boyfriend by this point — “a black man, which was important, and he was kind to us.” But the man who’d been the most central in shaping her picture of men remained her father. For a while there, she didn’t even know if he was dead or alive. (He died in 2003.)
    After winning the Miss Teen Ohio contest, and later going on to become the first runner-up in the Miss U.S.A. pageant, Berry studied for a year at Second City in Chicago. While she was there she got a call from a manager in New York, Vincent Cirrincione, looking for a black actress to read for a soap opera. Knowing no one in New York but Cirrincione, she got on a plane. Her breakthrough came with a TV series called “Living Dolls,” which took her to Los Angeles, followed by Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” in 1991, in which she played a crack addict. She had intended to read for another role but told the director she wanted to play the drug addict. She remembers that Lee said, “Well, you better go wash off your makeup.” She did and she got the part.
    Since then Berry has starred in more than 30 movies, winning, in addition to the first Academy Award for Best Actress ever given to a black woman, an Emmy for HBO’s “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge” in 2000. The scene in “Monster’s Ball” in which Berry’s character makes love to Billy Bob Thornton, playing a corrections officer who presided over her husband’s execution, stands as one of the most erotic I’ve ever seen on the screen, as a naked and moaning Halle Berry — more visibly naked than most A-list actresses would allow — crawls over Thornton’s character growling words that will no doubt be associated with the actress forever: “Make me feel good.”
    She also appeared in “X-Men” and played a Bond Girl and Catwoman, for which she won a Razzie award for Worst Actress. She actually showed up to accept, delivering, at the podium, a perfect satirical portrayal of a weeping and trembling actress, gripping her award tightly, thanking every person she ever met.
    Though Berry seems reluctant to speak of racism in her profession, it’s plain, talking with her, that she’s not unacquainted with its effects — having been told, over the years, that she was alternately too black or not black enough. The 1993 movie “Father Hood” may not have been great, but it is distinguished in Berry’s résumé as the first instance of a film role she won that had not been specifically designed for a black actress.
    Berry identifies herself as African-American, and in her acceptance speech for the Oscar, she chose to honor Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll. Yet spending time with Berry, I have the feeling that more than belonging to one race or another, what she feels like most is an outsider.
    We speak of her own experience, but also that of President Obama. She hasn’t met him, but she attended the inauguration and feels a connection to another dark-skinned child of an absent black father, raised by a white mother. “Being biracial is sort of like being in a secret society,” she says. “Most people I know of that mix have a real ability to be in a room with anyone, black or white.”
    “I come from humble beginnings,” she says. “I always felt like the underdog. Behind the eight ball. I learned not to be too high on the hog. Even that night I won the Oscar, I had a fundamental knowing, it was just a moment in time. Driving home that night, back to my house, I felt like Cinderella. I said, ‘When this night is over, I’m going back to who I was.’ And I did.”
    In “Cloud Atlas,” the range of characters Berry portrays goes from the most humble to a woman of the future, Meronym, whom Berry describes as “the priestess of the world.” These characters are meant to represent aspects of the same soul, reincarnated over time in different bodies and at different stages of its evolution. If this is how a human soul evolves, I ask her, where has hers gotten to so far?
    “I’ve been all those women,” she tells me. “Luisa Rey” — the crusading journalist reporting on the cover-up of an imminent nuclear disaster — “corresponds to who I was when I first started to make a living, the part of myself that was hopeful, the part that believed I could do anything. Meronym is that part of me I discovered after I had Nahla. I know more than my daughter does. And it’s my job to lead her through the world and find a safe place for her. Even though I know I’ve made mistakes, myself.”
    Before we met, I had heard Berry described as “fragile.” Something about her suggests that the gifts of beauty, talent and magnetism are not necessarily sufficient to ensure a person’s emotional well-being. During her Oprah interview, her voice broke more than once on the subject of having lost her trust in men, and though that was eight years ago, the evidence of vulnerability remains a significant part of what draws you to Halle Berry. She is a woman whom people (men, in particular) would doubtless feel moved to protect. Though it is possible that those same men may end up being the ones from whom she needs protection.
    But as much as some women may possess a fragile center beneath a tough exterior, it seems to me that for Berry the opposite applies. My first impression was her soft voice, gentle manner, accessibility and warmth — what Tom Hanks describes as “a Zen-like peacefulness.” Yet there’s a steely toughness in her core, without which she would probably not have gotten where she has.
    During the first week of filming “Cloud Atlas,” Berry broke her foot in Majorca. “She called it ‘a bump in the road,’ ” Hanks says. “But this was a severe break. In between takes, she had to be helped to her chair because she couldn’t stand up on her own.”
    In an e-mail to me, Andy and Lana Wachowski wrote, “The first day after she got her cast off her foot she had to do a scene standing on a rock in the middle of a river.” Berry slipped on her broken foot, and the entire crew screamed with her — it was obviously terribly painful. Then, they recalled, “this fire just ignited in her eyes and she was suddenly Meronym again. The take was flawless. It’s the one in the film. She is one of the gutsiest actors we’ve ever worked with.”
    We are on our third cup of tea when a concierge at the Four Seasons approaches Berry with a note. A substantial crowd of photographers has now gathered outside. Her expression, seeing this, appears resigned. It is not a remotely unfamiliar event but one that will require her to be hustled out a back exit of the hotel. Hanks, describing what Berry and Nahla experience, calls it a “nearly criminal level of persecution,” uniquely reserved for female stars and their children. Halle Berry more than almost any of them.
    After completing work on “Cloud Atlas,” Berry had been scheduled to make her Broadway debut opposite Samuel L. Jackson in “The Mountaintop,” Katori Hall’s two-person play about Martin Luther King Jr.’s final hours. She stepped away from the production last year as a result of “child-custody issues.” Currently Nahla spends alternate weekends with her father while Berry pursues her custody petition — a choice she says has as much to do with French regulations prohibiting the press from pursuing children as it does with the nationality of the man she plans to marry.
    “I can’t grow my daughter in L.A.,” she tells me. “You take a little child who is just trying to learn about the world and have all these people with cameras chasing after her, calling things out to her about her mother. It’s starting to make her feel special and different. I want her to feel special and different, but not for the reason of being my child.”
    I ask Berry what she’d do — where she’d go — if she could manage to evade the press, and not look like Halle Berry, for just one day.
    “I’d go to the market with my daughter,” she says. “Go to Santa Monica Pier and take her on a ride. Nothing special. Just live some normal life for once.”
    Her favorite book to read to Nahla, she says, is “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” in which a 4-year-old boy, wanting to go for a walk but finding no moon to light his way, takes out his magic crayon and draws one, along with a path to walk on and a series of places that lead him to other adventures, and finally back home.
    “It’s a book about creating your own reality,” Berry says. “Sometimes, with Nahla, we’ll take out the crayons and I’ll say, ‘If you could be Harold — only you’re Nahla — and you had that purple crayon, where would you go?’
    “We think up all kinds of things to do and places to go,” she says. Could be Santa Monica. Could be Paris. “One thing about Harold, he’s colorless. That crayon can take you anywhere.”
    Halle Berry models every season’s wardrobe essentials: a great jacket and classic denim. Salvatore Ferragamo jacket, $17,300; (800) 628-8916. Isabel Marant shirt, $145; (212) 219-2284. Hermès belt, $2,050;hermes.com. Guess jeans, $98; guess.com. Janis by Janis Savitt necklace, $588, bracelets, $625 and $940, and rings, $125, $150 and $200; (212) 245-7396.
    Versace jacket, $4,525, and shirt, $1,075; (888) 721-7219. Hudson jeans, $198; hudsonjeans.com.
    Balmain jacket, price on request, and shirt, $1,800; barneys.com. Mawi necklace, $1,480; mawi.co.uk.
    Chanel jacket, $10,067; (800) 550-0005. Graff necklace and rings, price on request; graffdiamonds.com.
    Mugler jacket, price on request; mugler.com. Burberry Prorsum shirt, $1,295; burberry.com. 7 For All Mankind jeans, $215;7forallmankind.com. Christian Louboutin shoes, $625;christianlouboutin.com. Mawi bracelets, $600, $835, $1,020, and ring, $400.
    Lanvin jacket, $10,595, and necklaces, $795 and $895;bergdorfgoodman.com. Isabel Marant shirt, $225. J. Brand jeans, $196; jbrandjeans.com. Max Mara hat, $395; (212) 879-6100. Eddie Borgo necklace, $875; eddieborgo.com. Eddie Borgo cuff bracelet, $450; neimanmarcus.com. Eddie Borgo cone bracelet, $525;bergdorfgoodman.com. Noir Jewelry bracelet, $110;noirjewelry.com. Fashion assistants: Mauricio Quezada and Mollie Maguire. Hair by Neeko at Dew Beauty Agency and Salon Sessions using Oribe. Makeup by Kara Yoshimoto Bua for Chanel using Revlon. Manicure by Deborah Lippmann.
    A version of this article appeared in print on 10/21/2012, on page M268 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Roles of a Lifetime.