Halle Berry: Hollywood's hottest Black actress has a new husband, a new home and a new attitude

Ebony, April, 1993 by Laura Randolph

Look closely at Halle Berry's fife and you will see something that even a super close-up on the big screen would never reveal. For years, she has been searching for something. Make that two somethings: There is her search for the woman inside her, the real Halle--not the uncertain little girl, half Black, half White, all confused. And there is the far more agonizing search for, as she puts it, "sincere love from a man."

That's why what seems to the casual observer like a dream life was often, until recently, a real-life nightmare.

Now, however, with her triumphant performance as Alex Haley's grandmother in the blockbuster miniseries Queen and her surprise wedding to Atlanta Braves outfielder David Justice in the wee morning hours on New Year's Day, she has finally exorcised her emotional demons, including the ones that for so long drove her into the arms of abusive men in a fervent search for love.

At 24, never before has she understood herself so deeply. Never before has she had greater mastery of her talents and her calling.

"It's a painful process when you have to dig deep inside yourself and find out who you are," says Halle, curling up on the overstuffed couch that anchors the cozy den of her woodsy Atlanta home, where she has lived since October with Justice. "You have to be real honest with yourself and that was a process that took me a long time: finding out who I was, what I wanted, why I'm here."

The journey, however, was not only long, it was often anguishing. Although her memorable roles in a string of hit movies--a crackhead in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, an exotic dancer in The Last Boy Scout, Eddie Murphy's lover in Boomerang--have made her the hottest Black actress in Hollywood, this daughter of a White mother and a Black father would be the first to tell you she has led an uneasy life.

Like the character she played in Queen, her internal turmoil started early in life, largely because of her confusion about her racial identity. "I saw a lot of the young me in Queen," she confesses. "The confusion, the uncertainty, not really knowing if you should be Black or White."

That confusion created some agonizing moments. "I had a lot of problems in high school," she confides. "It was predominantly White and I wasn't really accepted there. I was in a fight practically every week. The Black kids assumed I thought I was better than they were, and the White kids didn't like me because I was Black. And I didn't know who I felt comfortable with, Black people or White people."

Thanks to her mother, however, her uncertainty didn't last very long. "My mother cleared it up for me when I was very young," she explains. "She said when you look in the minor you're going to see a Black woman. You're going to be discriminated against as a Black woman so ultimately, in this society, that's who you will be. And that's made my life very easy. . . I think if you're an interracial child and you're strong enough to live I'm neither Black nor White but in the middle,' then, more power. But I needed to make a choice and feel part of this culture. I feel a lot of pride in being a Black woman."

That pride notwithstanding, just as her mother had warned, her color became a major issue during her senior year in high school when after she was elected prom queen, she was accused of stealing the crown. "They weren't about to have a Black prom queen, so they accused me of stuffing the ballot box," she says. "When it came to academics, I was always an A student and they were comfortable with that. But when it came to being the queen, that was something different. And so they decided there would be co-queens. Me and this White, blond, blue-eyed, all-American girl."

The decision cut Halle deeply. "It was devastating," she says quietly. "It made me feel like I wasn't beautiful; that they don't see us as being beautiful." More upsetting, however, to Halle than sharing the crown was the reaction of her so-called friends, who pretended to support her but backed the decision of the administration.

Pretense, or as Halle candidly puts it, "lying and deception," is a theme that has repeated itself many times in her adult life, most destructively in her romantic relationships. Because she didn't have a father while growing up ("He was an alcoholic," she says, (and left when I was four), she hungered for love.

"I always wanted it," she says, referring to an honest, romantic relationship. And I think that's why I allowed myself to get in some strange relationships because I was just searching for that. I wanted it so badly that I didn't realize the signs that were so obvious saying |This aint it.' In my relationships before David, I would look to men for acceptance and reassurance, just like you would a father."

For Halle, that critical understanding wasn't always so clear. It only crystallized with the passage of time. "I used to think not having a father was no big deal. You don't really miss what you never had," she says. "But as I've gotten older I realize I have missed the influence of a further in my life and I think that's why I haven't dealt with relationships with men very well because I was never sure how to."