Actress and model. Halle Maria Berry was born August 14th, 1966, in Cleveland, Ohio. The youngest daughter born to Jerome and Judith Berry, an interracial couple. Halle and her older sister Heidi spent the first few years of their childhood living in an inner-city neighborhood. In the early 1970s, Jerome Berry abandoned his wife and children, after which Judith moved her family to the predominantly white Cleveland suburb of Bedford.


A natural performer, Berry earned a handful of beauty pageant titles during the early 1980s, including Miss Teen Ohio and Miss Teen America. She was eventually awarded first runner-up in the 1985 Miss U.S.A. competition. For a short time she attended Cleveland 's Cuyahoga Community College, where she studied broadcast journalism. However, Berry abandoned her idea of a career in news reporting before receiving her degree. Choosing to wholeheartedly devote her time to a career in entertainment, Berry first moved to Chicago and then New York City, where she found work as a catalog model.

In the summer of 2001, she co-starred with John Travolta in the action movie Swordfish. Audiences did not respond positively to the film, and publicity for the movie centered mostly around Berry's topless scene, for which the actress was allegedly paid a $500,000 bonus. But Berry also garnered the most positive critical notice of her film career that same year in the dark drama Monster's Ball. Berry played the wife of a death row prisoner (Sean "Puffy" Combs) who becomes romantically involved with a racist prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton)
In 2005, she took the lead in the TV adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's classic 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was produced by Oprah Winfrey's production company, Harpo.

She also lent her voice for the CGI cartoon project, Robots. Then in 2006, she starred in the third X-Men installment, X-Men: The Final Stand, switching gears in 2007 to star in the heart-racing thriller, Perfect Stranger, co-starring Bruce Willis. In April of 2007, she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Berry is also one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, earning as much as $14 million a film. She is currently working on the movie Frankie and Alice, which is expected to primere in 2009.