Halle Berry Shares Her Biggest Disappointment After Winning an Oscar
Halle Berry was the first Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress, but it wasn't as rewarding as she thought it would be.
Known for films like Catwoman, Call for Emergency, Die Another Day, and countless others, Halle Berry revealed in a recent podcast how her life and career turned out after winning her Oscar in 2002. She took home the statuette for Best Actress for her performance in The Last Supper, thus becoming the first Black woman to receive the award.
"I thought a truck full of scripts was going to back up to my door and dump them all in front of me," she recalled. However, the actress realized that the reality was completely different. "That's my naivety. I had a historic victory. Clearly [I imagined] that meant this fight would be permanently easier for me," she continued.
Berry waited for weeks until she realized these scripts weren't going to come out the way she had imagined, and that's when it hit her. "It just didn't happen. I had this award and I couldn't go anywhere without people knowing my name. But within the industry, the big famous directors, nobody cared about me. My reality returned to normal and I was still suffering for being "just a pretty face," vented the actress.
In her latest work, Wound, Berry plays a former MMA fighter. The actress also makes her directorial debut and even received the Career Achievement Award at the Black Cinema Tribute. Despite this, Halle Berry says that she no longer gives the same value to the prizes. "Let's stop coveting this and let it be the measure of our value and our success."