Born in the year 1966 in Cleveland, Ohio, Halle Berry is a talented actress and former beauty queen. She was born as Halle Maria Berry on August 14, 1966 in Cleveland, Ohio. In the early 1970s, her father Jerome Berry abandoned his wife and children and her mother Judith moved with her family to a white majority Cleveland suburb of Bedford.
She studied in an almost all-white public school where she was subjected to a lot of racial discrimination as a young child. Her early confrontations with racism motivated her to excel in life. Berry was a natural performer and she won various beauty pageant titles in the early 1980s such as Miss Teen Ohio and Miss Teen America. She ended up as the first runner-up in the 1985 Miss U.S.A. pageant.
She briefly attended the Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland where she studied broadcast journalism. However, she gave up on her plans to pursue a career in news reporting before getting a degree. After she decided to focus solely on an entertainment career, Berry first went to Chicago and then to New York City where she got work as a catalog model. Her stunning performance in Monster’s Ball (2001) made her the first African-American lady t o win a best actress Oscar Award. She has also played major roles in Jungle Fever (1991), Die another Day (2002), X-Men (2000) and its sequels Swordfish (2001), Gothika (2003), Cloud Atlas (2012) and Kidnap (2017).