Halle Berry, is an American actress, former beauty queen and the only African American woman to have the Best Actress Academy Award.Halle began her career in modelling entering several beauty contest and going on to win the Miss Teen All-American in 1985 and Miss Ohio USA a year later.She moved to Chicago in the late eighties to further her modelling as well as take up acting.The short lived television series Living Dolls, in which she played Emily Franklin, proved to be a great stepping stone into movies.Her breakthrough role came in Spike Lee's 1991 picture Jungle Fever starring Wesley Snipes.The film centred on an interracial romance between married Flipper Purify (Snipes) and an Italian-American woman AngieTucci (Annabella Sciorra).Her first co-staring role came in 1991 with Strictly Business were she starred with Tommy Davidson and Joseph C. Phillips.

The young actress demonstrated her ability to take on more challenging roles with Losing Isaiah in 1995.

Berry took on the role of Khaila Richards, a crack cocaine addict, who, after losing her son when she leaves him in the trash to go and get high, fights, once she is clean, to regain custody of him.

Awards came her way in 1999 for her role in television film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge winning an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance.

She returned to the big screen in the film version of popular comic and cartoon X- Men as Storm.

The film was one of the largest grossing movies of 200 and spawned two sequels and has since become one of the most popular comic book movie franchises.

But it was her role as Leticia Musgrove in Monster's Ball that won her the Academy Award.

The film followed Hank, an embittered prison guard, lives with his aging racist father, Buck, and his own twentysomething son, Sonny.

Hank and Sonny work for the local prison where they are preparing the electric chair for a black inmate.

After the man is executed, Hank falls in love with Leticia, the inmate's widow. This emotionally-charged affair forces Hank to re-evaluate how deeply prison work and his father's infectious hatred have affected his soul.

Overall Monster's Ball was met well critically but many African Americans were split over Berry's Best Actress award win.

She also won the BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and the National Board of Review for her performance before giving that memorable speech when winning the Oscar.

But since then the movies in which she has starred, excluding X-Men, have not been a success at the box office.

But her new movie Things We Lost in The Fire sees Halle Berry return to her best alongside Benicio Del Toro Berry stars as Audrey Burke who is reeling from the shock of the news that has just been delivered to her door by the local police: her warm and loving husband Brian (David Duchovny), the father of their two young children, has been killed in a random act of violence.

Once anchored by the love and comforts of their 11-year marriage, Audrey is now adrift. Impulsively, she turns to Jerry Sunborne (Del Toro), a down-and-out addict who has been her husband’s close friend since childhood.

Desperate to fill the painful void caused by her husband’s death, Audrey invites Jerry to move into the room adjacent to their garage in the hope that he can help her and her children cope with their sudden loss.

Jerry is facing a daily battle to stay off drugs, but in his unexpected role as surrogate parent and friend to Audrey’s son and daughter he finds a core of inner resilience.

As Jerry and Audrey navigate grief and denial, their fragile bonds are constantly tested. Working together, however, they discover the strength to move forward.

Halle is about to become a mother for the first time as she is and partner Gabriel Aubry, who is ten years her junior, are expecting a child together.

Things We Lost In The Fire is released 1st February.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

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