The four icons on Halle Berry’s acting Mount Rushmore: “Who I would aspire to be”
Halle Berry‘s childhood in Ohio wasn’t easy.
Her parents divorced when she was only four years old, and she and her sister were raised entirely by their white mother, Judith. After initially going to an inner city school, Judith enrolled her girls in an almost exclusively white school in the suburbs, and sadly, this is where Berry was made to feel very aware of her nature as an “other”.
“All of a sudden, we were in an all-white school with all-white kids, like 3 out of 2500 students,” Berry told People in 2017. “Because my mother was white and my father was Black, we got called ‘Oreos’ and names, and kids just didn’t understand, so we were different. We were the brunt of a lot of jokes.”
This is why, when the young Berry watched movies and television at a young age, she always kept a keen eye out for the Black actors representing her ethnicity. For long periods, she struggled to find on-screen images of Black women that she could relate to, but that all changed when she began watching the four actors she’d later place on her metaphorical Mount Rushmore.
“Early on, I remember seeing Lena Horne in Stormy Weather,” Berry revealed, referring to the seminal singer who pioneered Black musicals in the 1940s. Another musical starring a Black singer also caught the young girl’s eye, with Berry recalling, “I remember seeing Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones.” That 1954 musical saw Dandridge become the first African-American performer to be nominated for ‘Best Actress’ at the Oscars.
Heartwarmingly, in 1999, Berry got to pay tribute to one of her heroes when she played Dandridge in the HBO movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, winning an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe in the process. However, the Black actor who made the biggest impression on Berry at a young age was a sitcom star she could watch every week on television. “A little after that, I remember seeing Diahann Carroll in Julia,” Berry gushed, “And that just rearranged me.”
Julia ran for three seasons and 86 episodes between 1968 and 1971, and starred Carroll as the titular nurse and widowed single mother. Julia made history from its first airing, as it was the very first American TV series to star a Black actor who wasn’t playing a slave or a servant. The fact that it took so long for a Black star to be recognised as something other than subservient to their white counterparts is undeniably horrifying, but at the time, it meant the world to young girls like Berry.
“Seeing Diahann Carroll being the star of a show and playing a mother who was a nurse, who was educated, who was beautiful, just rearranged me,” Berry reiterated. “It made me realise I had value and I could turn to – every week – a woman that looked like me, who I would aspire to be when I grew up. It was very, very important.”
After Horne, Dandridge, and Carroll, the fourth star to be permanently etched on Berry’s Mount Rushmore is another one she wound up paying tribute to in a role, albeit not one of her finer ones. When asked about her TV heroes, she lit up and immediately said, “Eartha Kitt! Her version of Catwoman”. Kitt, of course, was one of three actors to play DC Comics’ iconic cat burglar antihero in the classic 1960s Batman TV show, and she broke ground by being the only Black star to play the character until Berry came along in 2004.
Unfortunately, Berry’s version of Catwoman was, shall we say, not particularly well-received, and she even accepted a Razzie award for her performance in person. Still, without Kitt forging a path in the ’60s, it’s arguable that a Black star would never have been put in a position to play the lead in such a big movie – and that’s more than enough to warrant inclusion on Mount Rushmore.
