Rewrite the script

Published on Saturday 15 December 2007 11:00

After a catalogue of froth, Halle Berry rejoiced at finding the kind of challenging role that once earned her an Oscar.

But she tells Siobhan Synnot that she is still having to strongarm Hollywood into giving black actresses the best parts.

WHAT'S not to like about Halle Berry? Well there's Catwoman perhaps, and also a handful of other largely forgettable, though inoffensive movies. But does that give Berry's fans the right to take matters into their own hands and offer her career advice?

"People have the feeling that they can tell me what they like and what they didn't like", says Berry, who is still immediately recognisable despite having grown out her trademark sparky pixiebob in favour of a long curtain of hair. "They'll come up and say, 'Don't make movies like that anymore.' I get that a lot."

They should be happier with her latest picture then, a return to Berry's smaller independent work, made without special effects and skintight leather for far less than her usual 7m fee. "You're there because you love the material, you love what you do," she says.

Things We Lost In The Fire focuses on a family numbed by the tragic loss of a husband and father (David Duchovny). Berry's character is left with two children who can barely process what has happened, and at first seems to focus all her unformed anger at her husband's best friend, a Lou Reed-loving, heroin-addicted, kid-friendly ex-lawyer (Benicio Del Toro, star of Traffic and 21 Grams).

This rickety mix of tearjerker, junkie-recovery story and odd-couple pairing could be tough going, and not just because it skirts the edges of grief-porn. Yet it is the sort of work Berry used to give regularly, and much of it comes from her openness to the material, and a willingness to play unsympathetic, confused and angry. Both she and Del Toro give strong, grown-up performances and the film gathers strength as it progresses; as a woman at the end of her emotional rope, Berry even pulls off a scene that is usually Kryptonite for actresses: a moment in which a police officer knocks on her door, bearing bad news.

Berry, who had never worked with Del Toro before, says she enjoyed observing his unpredictable technique, such as a scene where a child's Star Wars lunchbox is incorporated into his detoxing hallucinations. "I learned a lot from watching his sort of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, stay-in-the-moment method," says Berry, who adds that he also contributed a playfulness to many scenes.

"He has a wonderful way of finding the funny in every situation. In every scene, he would make one take funny, and I'd just sit back and watch him because I knew it would be coming eventually; that added a lot of lightness for me."

The facility of the Oscar-winning Del Toro with emotional material is not a surprise. But it is especially satisfying to report that, as widow and mother Audrey Burke, Berry produces what is easily her best work since winning her Academy Award for 2001's Monster's Ball.

To prepare for the role, Berry read Joan Didion's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Year Of Magical Thinking, about Didion's own struggle with grief following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Berry also studied grief psychology. And she drew on her own experiences of personal tragedy.

Anguish is something of a specialist subject for Berry. Berry and her sister were abandoned by their abusive father, Jerome Berry, and raised single-handed by her mother, Judith. At school, she was given the nicknames 'Zebra', 'Half-Breed' and 'Oreo Cookie'. In 41 years, she has survived racism, a stalker, two unfaithful husbands and a series of disastrous relationships. If her own life has sometimes seemed like a movie, then her men have turned it into a horror flick; during her first divorce battle Berry claimed her baseball star husband chased "every prostitute, stripper, every twinkie walking by with a skirt", and admitted that she'd considered suicide. "I was going to sit in a car and asphyxiate myself," she recalled. "But I thought, 'What is my mother going to think?'"

More recently, there was a car crash for which she was fined for fleeing the scene; and some regrettable verbal infelicities – earlier in the autumn she remarked that a distorted photo of her with an enlarged nose looked as if it could pass for a picture of "my Jewish cousin".

And few can forget her Oscar acceptance speech, which set a new standard in emotional outpourings. The night that Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won their Oscar awards was supposed to end the racial divide, at least in cinema. Yet five years later there are still only two A-list black stars around: Washington himself and Will Smith. Berry did fine work in Jungle Fever, Losing Isaiah and the biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge before Monster's Ball, but since then her star has dipped with a series of unfortunate choices including Catwoman, a furball which had critics coughing up punning variants on "catastrophic", followed by Gothika, where she ran about in wet-look jail fatigues that begged for their own page in Vogue.

By the time she was miming sexual ecstasy with Bruce Willis in Perfect Stranger, Berry was in grave danger of having her statuette recalled. Sportingly, she collected a Razzie Worst Actress award for Catwoman in person, but says she refuses to regret any of these films: "Sometimes those things work really well, sometimes they don't," she shrugs. "As a person, and as an actor, it worked well for me. I tried new things, I took risks and I faced certain fears. You don't win big by just making mediocre choices."

Shockingly – or not, actually – Berry is still frequently considered only for characters written or conceived as black. She may be the most famous black actress in the world, but she feels there are still racial restrictions placed on her movies. In her bitter experience, Hollywood is happy to shout its liberal politics until the moment it's time to sign a contract. Despite her Oscar, Berry had to fight for the role of Audrey Burke, and derives some satisfaction in Things We Lost In The Fire's racially mixed cast, with Berry and Mexican Del Toro in roles that were written as white.

"What's hardest for me to swallow," she says, "is when there is a love story, say, with a really high-profile male star and there's no reason I can't play the part. They say, 'Oh, we love Halle, we just don't want to go black with this part.' What enrages me is that those are such racist statements, but the people saying them don't think they are. I've had it said right to my face."

At one point she lost a role as a park ranger in the John Woo film Broken Arrow because a studio executive decreed that there was no such thing as a black park ranger.

"Since the woman in Things We Lost In The Fire wasn't written as a black character, I wasn't the first thought on anybody's mind. But very early on, I said to my manager, 'I know the studio's not thinking of me, but if I could just meet with the director.'" Berry got her wish when Susanne Bier, who made Open Hearts and After The Wedding, agreed to see Berry on a stopover in New York on her way to Denmark. "I hoped maybe Susanne would be able to see outside the box."

Personally and professionally, Berry now appears to have found some stability after a tumultuous decade. Two years ago, she met model Gabriel Aubry while shooting a Versace ad and the couple are expecting a baby boy in March, the Oscar-winning actress's first biological child; she legally adopted her second husband's daughter, India, during their marriage.

Portraying a mother in Things We Lost In The Fire, finally convinced her that this was another role she was capable of taking on. "Playing Audrey and having such close connection with the children and dealing with the children as a mother made me realise this was something that I was really meant to do. The funny part is, everywhere I go, everybody gives me advice," she says, laughing.

"It's all lovingly given, but everybody has a different method of child rearing, and I have to find my own way, take some advice that feels right and discard the rest. Motherhood doesn't come with a manual." v

Things We Lost In The Fire is released on February 1 www.thingswelostinthefire.com