Hollywood Uncensored with Sam Rubin EP 119: How do you get into Character...or Characters?

SamRubinUncensored | 04 January 2011 | 
This is a very special edition of Hollywood Uncensored this week. Rather than our usual panel of four guests, we have one very talented actress. Oscar winner and Golden Globe nominee, Halle Berry, joins us for a one-on-one, uncensored discussion about her new movie, Frankie and Alice, award buzz, and what it's like to do her job.

She is such a terrific actress, we wonder, how does she get into character? Halle explains what it's like for her to be "in the moment" while she's acting. It sounds like quite an emotional roller coaster to us!

Halle's new film, "Frankie and Alice," took TWELVE YEARS to create. But why was this movie, in particular, so difficult to get off the ground? The amazing story behind Halle's patience and perseverance, and why she was compelled to stick with it.

With her upcoming Golden Globe appearance, and her obvious mastery of "flirting with the camera," it only seems natural that we ask the expert herself, what are these award shows all about? With all those dresses and tuxedos... and huge crystal bowls of punch, the award shows seem like an all-out party- the Hollywood equivalent to the prom. We find out if this is the truth, or if the awards are really just a load of unwanted pressure.

If you're an actor, then making the movie is only part of the job. Often times, the most grueling part is promoting the film. This is what Halle is in the midst of doing right now. But, is this a a labor of love, or an endless and somewhat thankless task?

Even a star as great as Halle Berry doesn't get to escape the Crystal Ball! But, Halle gives her own unique twist to the tradition. She tells us what she knows will NOT happen in the future of entertainment. Hint: The "big screen." Make sure to to tune into Hollywood Uncensored, our special Halle Berry edition, this Saturday on the ReelzeChannel. TV about movies.

Hollywood Uncensored with Sam Rubin EP 119: What was your favorite Movie Role?

SamRubinUncensored | 04 January 2011 |
This is a very special edition of Hollywood Uncensored this week. Rather than our usual panel of four guests, we have one very talented actress. Oscar winner and Golden Globe nominee, Halle Berry, joins us for a one-on-one, uncensored discussion about her new movie, Frankie and Alice, award buzz, and what it's like to do her job.

She is such a terrific actress, we wonder, how does she get into character? Halle explains what it's like for her to be "in the moment" while she's acting. It sounds like quite an emotional roller coaster to us!

Halle's new film, "Frankie and Alice," took TWELVE YEARS to create. But why was this movie, in particular, so difficult to get off the ground? The amazing story behind Halle's patience and perseverance, and why she was compelled to stick with it.

With her upcoming Golden Globe appearance, and her obvious mastery of "flirting with the camera," it only seems natural that we ask the expert herself, what are these award shows all about? With all those dresses and tuxedos... and huge crystal bowls of punch, the award shows seem like an all-out party- the Hollywood equivalent to the prom. We find out if this is the truth, or if the awards are really just a load of unwanted pressure.

If you're an actor, then making the movie is only part of the job. Often times, the most grueling part is promoting the film. This is what Halle is in the midst of doing right now. But, is this a a labor of love, or an endless and somewhat thankless task?

Even a star as great as Halle Berry doesn't get to escape the Crystal Ball! But, Halle gives her own unique twist to the tradition. She tells us what she knows will NOT happen in the future of entertainment. Hint: The "big screen." Make sure to to tune into Hollywood Uncensored, our special Halle Berry edition, this Saturday on the ReelzeChannel. TV about movies.


Hollywood Uncensored with Sam Rubin EP 119: Does Does Halle Feel "In the Moment?"

SamRubinUncensored | 04 January 2011 |
This is a very special edition of Hollywood Uncensored this week. Rather than our usual panel of four guests, we have one very talented actress. Oscar winner and Golden Globe nominee, Halle Berry, joins us for a one-on-one, uncensored discussion about her new movie, Frankie and Alice, award buzz, and what it's like to do her job.

She is such a terrific actress, we wonder, how does she get into character? Halle explains what it's like for her to be "in the moment" while she's acting. It sounds like quite an emotional roller coaster to us!

Halle's new film, "Frankie and Alice," took TWELVE YEARS to create. But why was this movie, in particular, so difficult to get off the ground? The amazing story behind Halle's patience and perseverance, and why she was compelled to stick with it.

With her upcoming Golden Globe appearance, and her obvious mastery of "flirting with the camera," it only seems natural that we ask the expert herself, what are these award shows all about? With all those dresses and tuxedos... and huge crystal bowls of punch, the award shows seem like an all-out party- the Hollywood equivalent to the prom. We find out if this is the truth, or if the awards are really just a load of unwanted pressure.

If you're an actor, then making the movie is only part of the job. Often times, the most grueling part is promoting the film. This is what Halle is in the midst of doing right now. But, is this a a labor of love, or an endless and somewhat thankless task?

Even a star as great as Halle Berry doesn't get to escape the Crystal Ball! But, Halle gives her own unique twist to the tradition. She tells us what she knows will NOT happen in the future of entertainment. Hint: The "big screen." Make sure to to tune into Hollywood Uncensored, our special Halle Berry edition, this Saturday on the ReelzeChannel. TV about movies.

Tuesday, 4 January 2011

Halle Berry prom photo

Celebrity prom pictures you've never seen before

We are used to seeing political figures like US First Lady Michelle Obama and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin prim and proper in their powersuits, but have you ever seen them in their high school days in sweet and innocent prom dresses? What about Claire Danes and Halle Berry when they were in their teens? Have you seen pictures of them then?

AsiaOne releases before and after photos of celebrities on their prom nights - like you've never seen before.

Will Ferrell was prom king and Courtney Cox is unrecognisable. But who would have thought they'd make it big one day?


More Celeb Prom photos of here

http://www.asiaone.com/static/multimedia/gallery/110104_prom/

Halle Berry reveals all on movies, family and the new love in her life

Halle Berry reveals all on movies, family and the new love in her life

Halle Berry (Pic:Getty Images)
IT used to be difficult not to feel a little sorry for Halle Berry.
Yes, she is famous, has won an Oscar and enjoys all the trappings that go with Hollywood stardom. And yet… 
It seemed that whenever she was obliged to submit to interviews to promote a new film she was forced to dodge questions about the latest disaster in her private life.
There was her diabetes, the breakup of a marriage, the split from the latest boyfriend, a mugging, tangles with the law over hit-and-run driving – always something new and unpleasant to be interrogated about.

Now, however, things are different. Her life is on the up and it is a genuinely happy, smiling Halle, 44, who sits in an office in West Hollywood eager to talk for the first time about her new boyfriend and her role as a mum to daughter Nahla, two.
“I’ve wanted this for so long and I feel happier than ever before,” she says.  
“I’m happy and fulfilled and I’m in a really good space in my life. I’ve survived many highs and many lows and I think I have it all in perspective now – never get too high and never get too low.”
Nahla’s father is Canadian male model Gabriel Aubry, with whom Halle had a four-year relationship, which ended in April. Gabriel, 10 years her junior, still sees his daughter regularly.
“We’re Nahla’s parents and we both just want what is best for her,” says Halle.    
“Children shift your priorities and now I have a greater purpose for being here. I love making movies but I would give it all up to be with my daughter if I had to because she’s the love of my life. She’s made me a better person because everything I do and say, everything I want and don’t want, I think first: Will this be best for her?
“When you have children you get to see things all over again. So I’ve never laughed as hard, I’ve never done more silly things, and I go to great lengths to make her laugh. She’s awakened a childlike side of me.
“Every choice I make now, and that includes who I choose to spend personal time with as a partner, is not just about me any more, it’s about what’s best for her.”
At the moment her personal time is being spent with the 44-year-old French actor Olivier Martinez, once Kyle Minogue’s lover, who she met in August when they co-starred in the not-yet released thriller Dark Tide.

REALISTIC
“I am just a girl who met a boy; a girl who liked a boy; a boy liked the girl and then that’s what happened,” she laughs.
A survivor of a string of unhappy relationships, she is realistic enough to know that like her previous love affairs, this one may not last.
“I always stay hopeful. Life is about ups and downs and learning pains and growing and happiness and sadness and that’s all part of it.
“The good thing is I don’t feel I’ve become jaded. I still want to be in love. I still love it when I see people who have been married 20 years and I think, ‘Wow, it is possible.’”
Then she adds candidly: “But you know, I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that 20 years of marriage may not be for me but it doesn’t mean I can’t have great relationships and be happy and enjoy people while they’re in my life, that’s how I look at it.”
Wearing a grey, body-hugging Dolce & Gabbana dress with black Gucci shoes, and her hair cropped short, the actress appears far younger than her years.
But her good looks are in spite of having had to take a tougher route to the top than her peers. “Not many good parts are written for black women at all and that’s been a struggle my entire career,” she says, without rancour. “I’ve finally realised I’m going to have to start making things happen for myself if that’s what I want to do.” 
With that in mind, she set about bringing what she calls her “passion project” to the screen. She bought the rights to the story of a woman struggling with a multiple personality disorder who is torn between who she is and a racist alter ego that preys on her mind and takes over her emotions.
Halle has spent 10 years creating a script and trying to raise money for the project.
The result is Frankie and Alice, a 1970s-set psychological drama which allows her to give full rein to her acting talents.
“Bringing this story to the screen has been a very satisfying experience,” she says. “It’s a great responsibility when you portray another person and not having this affliction myself it was really hard to understand what it must be like, but I watched hours and hours of tape of real patients and I read four or five books on the subject and tried to understand how and why it happens.”
Halle is the daughter of a blonde, blue-eyed English psychiatric nurse from Liverpool and a black American serviceman. She grew up in Cleveland, USA, amid racial prejudice, and recalls being called a zebra, an Oreo cookie, a half-caste and even, n*****.
“Being half black and half white I understand how racism rears its ugly head on both sides,” she says. “My mother’s family disowned her when she married my father and his family disowned him when he married my mother, so I understand how both sides have their issues.”
Her father left home when she was four years old and she and her older sister were raised by her mother.
“She was a single mom and she didn’t have any money. I jokingly tell her she got it all wrong and she hits me with, ‘Well, you seem to have turned out ok, so how wrong did I get it?’ So then I just shut up.”

There was a time when Halle had little to laugh about. A teenage beauty queen, she was diagnosed as diabetic when she was 19 and was taking insulin until a decade ago when, by changing her diet and exercise programme, she weaned herself off the drug.
She survived an unhappy marriage to baseball player David Justice, after which she says she contemplated suicide, and a series of disastrous relationships – one former boyfriend sued her for £50,000 and another hit her so hard she became partially deaf.
She was attacked and mugged in an underground parking garage in 1995 and in 2000 she was fined and sentenced to community service for a hit-and-run accident after running a red light.
Halle said she had no memory of being in an accident, and her doctors said she had sustained a head injury. A subsequent civil case against her was settled out of court.
Her second marriage, to musician Eric Benet, ended in 2003 after two years because he could not control his roving eye. Only days after winning her Oscar for Monster’s Ball, she discovered her husband was a sex addict and he entered rehab for treatment.
“After that great high of winning the Oscar I hit one of the greatest lows I’ve ever experienced,” she says. “I plummeted right back into the depths of the valley.”
To add to her litany of woes, while filming the horror movie Gothika she suffered a broken arm while grappling with Robert Downey Jr. during an intense scene.
Like her private life, Halle’s career has been a series of highs and lows, from winning the Oscar and the commercial success of the three X-Men movies to the disastrous Catwoman.
Now she’s firmly on the Hollywood A-list but takes nothing for granted.
“This career has a lifespan and it could be over soon or I could work until I’m 90. I’m prepared to accept the realities of what happens when women age in this business.
“That’s the reality of it and there’s nothing I can do to change it.”


Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2011/01/03/halle-berry-reveals-all-on-movies-family-and-the-new-love-in-her-life-115875-22822481/#ixzz1A5Vvk6Up
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Halle Berry Opens Up About New Role

December 31, 2010
December 31, 2010
In her latest film "Frankie and Alice," actress Halle Berry plays a '70s era go-go dancer with multiple personality disorder — one of which is a child and the other bigoted southern belle. The actress discusses the role and her career.

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
AUDIE CORNISH, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
It's been nearly 20 years since we saw Halle Berry in her first major movie -Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever." The former beauty queen was hardly recognizable as a stumbling crack addict. Halle Berry never shies away from the not-so-pretty parts of life in her acting.
In her latest film, "Frankie and Alice," she plays a go-go dancer with multiple personalities - at one moment, a child; at the next, a bigoted Southern belle. She says it's based on a true story.

Ms. HALLE BERRY (Actress): I was ignited by the idea of this woman and intrigued and horrified at the same time, and I thought, wow, how does a black woman, a physically black woman, live with an alter personality that thinks she's white and Southern and a racist, like, how does that happen and then how does one live with the turmoil of that.

CORNISH: In this movie, when your central character, when she makes, I guess, the switch, for lack of a better word, it's almost in perceptible how you do that. And I wanted to know if you met the woman behind the Frankie character, or what kind of research you did to come up with this kind of characterization.

Ms. BERRY: I did meet the real Frankie and Alice, but I didn't meet her until after the process was over. We talked to her, and our writers interviewed her, but the real Frankie didn't remember much as the movie will suggest. So my research was more reading books on the subject. And I actually met a doctor that was willing to answer all of my questions, and he actually allowed me to see hours and hours of real tape of real patients in the therapeutic process going through all of their multiples and struggling with bringing them all together and...

CORNISH: Right. Because in the movie that happens to you as well. There's a scene where she's being videotaped, and you actually sort of cycle through...

Ms. BERRY: Right.

CORNISH: ...into one of these personalities.
(Soundbite of movie, "Frankie and Alice")

Mr. STELLAN SKARSGARD (Actor): (as Dr. Oz) Let's help you, Frankie. Where are you? Can you tell me where you are?

Ms. BERRY: (as Frankie Murdoch) I can't let you (unintelligible) me. (unintelligible), you knit me together. Your hands have (unintelligible) where you then turn and destroy me.

Mr. SKARSGARD: (as Dr. Oz) Who wants to destroy you, Alice?

Ms. BERRY: When they're seeing this for the first time, it's such a traumatic experience when they're taped like that, and they're put through the paces to bring all the characters out. And the way you get all the characters out is you force the host personality to relieve the trauma that actually caused the brain to fracture like it does.
And when they're put through that process and when they have to go back to that time when that horrific event happened, the body sort of goes into like an exorcism because all of the characters come out, and they're fighting to be heard.
They're fighting to explain. They're fighting to take over the body, and it becomes like watching an exorcism.
(Soundbite of movie, "Frankie and Alice")

Ms. BERRY: (as Frankie Murdoch) (Unintelligible) keep crying.
Unidentified Man: (as character) Yeah.

Ms. BERRY: (as Frankie Murdoch): Crying.

Ms. BERRY: And so we desperately wanted to put that element of the recovery of the disorder in our movie.

CORNISH: It took 10 years to get this film made, and you were the producer here. I mean, you had a bigger role in this film than just starring in it. What was that like for you? And how has producing changed your approach to your career?

Ms. BERRY: Well I realized - you know, I produced "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge" as well, so I have known now for a while that producing is something that I would have to do. Being a woman in the industry and then a woman of color, the great parts that I think I want to play are not out there for me.
You know, we still have a long way to go on this journey of finding total equality for women of color in the industry. So I have accepted that fact, and it's something that I know that I just have to do.

CORNISH: What has that meant for you? I mean, can you walk into a room and say, you know, Halle Berry, what's up? Like, let's just green light this thing and get it moving, or is it about (unintelligible)

Ms. BERRY: Obviously not. That's why it took me 10 years. Do you know how many rooms I walked in and say, he, I'm here. I've got this great movie. Want to do it? Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. So, obviously not, and that's a crude reality that, you know, I've had to face.
Even after winning an Academy Award, I somehow thought, okay, now I'm going to have an easier time making my Frankie movie. No. That still wasn't the case.

CORNISH: You mentioned winning the Oscar for best actress and that was for "Monster's Ball," and that was almost a decade ago." And it was the same year that, of course, Denzel Washington won his award for best actor.
But I want to play a clip of the speech you gave that night, a very moving speech.
(Soundbite of Ms. Halle Berry's speech at Academy Awards)

Ms. BERRY: This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox.
And it's for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.

CORNISH: Halle Berry, how are you feeling now? You know, 10 years later, do you feel that that what's happened?

Ms. BERRY: I do feel like that. We've had Jennifer Hudson. We've had Monique. We've had Jamie Foxx. We've had Forest Whitaker go on to win Academy Awards since then. So I do think that night was very inspiring for people of color, and there has been significant change.
But real evolution, I think people have to remember, is slow. If it's real and if it's meant to stay and not be a, you know, one time wonder, it's going to take time. And I think things are changing.

CORNISH: You've earned a Golden Globe nomination for this role in "Frankie and Alice," and a great deal of it, without giving away too much of the pot, rest on the relationship between mother's and daughters.
And now that you're a mother, how did that affect your thinking in making a film like this, or, I guess, affect your career?

Ms. BERRY: You know, mother and daughter relationships are always very complicated. The relationship with this mother and daughter, I think, was something that inspired me and I learned a lot from, and it's a real testament to the love of a mother.
And being a mother myself, there's nothing I wouldn't do for my daughter, whether it be legal or illegal.
(Soundbite of laughter)

CORNISH: She's only like, what, three right now, so that can't - hopefully you won't have to test that.

Ms. BERRY: No. But I can tell you, as sure as I'm sitting in this chair, if she killed somebody, I would help her bury the body.
(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. BERRY: And I would try very hard to protect her in any way that I could, and I think that's just an instinct of a mother. And that's probably wrong and people will probably - you'll probably get mail that Halle Berry said she (unintelligible) and she blah, blah, blah.
(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. BERRY: But I don't care. That's my daughter, and I would take a bullet for her. I'd go to jail. I'd end my life. I'd do whatever it took to protect that little girl. I don't care what she did, and that's what I said and I said it.

CORNISH: Is that also, I assume you're thinking about this now maybe, your old relationship with your mother?

Ms. BERRY: I hope my mother would do that for me. I don't know if she'd bury a body for me, but I hope she would protect me and she has in my lifetime, so yeah.
(Soundbite of music)

CORNISH: That's actress Halle Berry. She stars in "Frankie and Alice" which opens this month and will be in wide release early next year. She spoke to us from our studious in NPR West.
Halle Berry, thank you so much.

Ms. BERRY: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

CORNISH: You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

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