The film that made Halle Berry “fantasise and dream”
After elevating her status in the modelling world and finishing as the first runner-up in the Miss USA beauty pageant in the late 1980s, Halle Berry broke into Hollywood with an appearance in the 1992 romantic comedy Boomerang. Over the remainder of the decade, Berry took on various roles, reaching an early climax with 1999’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe.
By the turn of the century, Berry was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, and after winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ in 2002 for her role in Monster’s Ball, she appeared to be unstoppable. After a critically revered appearance as Bond girl Jinx in Pierce Brosnan’s final movie as 007, Die Another Day, a career peak was realised as her influence in Hollywood began to wane.
In a 2020 interview with Variety, Berry discussed her fall from grace. Following her Oscars success, Berry hoped for top filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg to come knocking, but the roles never came. “I think it’s largely because there was no place for someone like me,” Berry said. “I thought, ‘Oh, all these great scripts are going to come my way; these great directors are going to be banging on my door.’ It didn’t happen. It actually got a little harder. They call it the Oscar curse. You’re expected to turn in award-worthy performances.”
In 2021, Berry discussed her career with the Oscars’ publication A.frame. Returning to her childhood, Berry described herself as a “latchkey kid.” “I was raised by a single mom, and I was home alone a lot,” she added. “Which is probably why I watched The Sound of Music so many times — it was a great escape.
“I think most people enjoy movies because they get to escape, but I always felt like I didn’t see myself and the stories that I knew to be true reflected. There was always a disconnect because I was longing to see my life and connect to it that way.”
As part of her interview feature, Berry was tasked with picking out some of her favourite movies. For one of her selections, she chose Alfonso Arau’s 1992 movie Like Water for Chocolate.
“One of my teachers at school told me to watch it,” Berry said of the movie. “I was taking a course in cinema and filmmaking as an elective, and that started my love affair with foreign film. It birthed my ability to fantasise and dream, and I fell in love with this way of filmmaking that was very different from the movies that I had been enjoying at that time. That’s one that just spoke to my mind.”
Watch the trailer for Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate below.
