The one role Halle Berry has always wanted to play: “I would never do that without her blessing”
Halle Berry has had a storied career, making Oscars history playing a troubled widow and suiting up for both DC and Marvel cinematic vehicles. But the model-turned-actor, who has been working solidly in Hollywood for almost 30 years now, hasn’t achieved everything she wants yet.
Coming from a successful stint in the beauty pageant circuit, Berry broke through as a film actor in the early 1990s, eventually climbing to the highest echelons of the industry-rich list in the early 2000s. In this time, she established herself as both a sultry screen goddess, playing the bikini-clad Bond girl Jinx in Die Another Day and a latexed Batman antagonist/love interest in the standalone spinoff Catwoman.
But she also didn’t rest on her washboard abs. In the same time period, she became the first Black woman to win the ‘Best Actress’ Oscar at the 2002 Academy Awards. This may have been tempered by a conflicting Razzie win for her hammy performance in Catwoman the same year, but Berry took this in her stride, collecting both awards with good grace and humour.
Berry has never quite reached either this height or low since but still remained consistent in her qualitative and quantitive output. With the advent of streaming, she’s done what many industry heavyweights have and dipped into TV, providing her an opportunity to work as a producer and launch her own production company. Acting is still at the forefront of her creative output, however, and there remains one role in particular she’d relish taking on.
“I really would love to one day tell the story of Angela Davis,” Berry told The Guardian in 2015. “I don’t think she wants a story of her life to be told at this time, and I would never do that without her blessing. But that has always been a passion of mine. She’s just fascinating: the era she lived in, the Black Panthers and all that they stood for, and her connection to it, or not to it. I have a lot of respect for how she lived her life.”
One of the most recognisable and important figures in the American civil rights movement, professor, activist and philosopher Angela Davis, has barely strayed away from political activism since the 1960s. As well as campaigning for racial equality and against the Vietnam war, more recently, she’s been involved in the Occupy movement and the Palestinian-led BDS group promoting divestment in Israel.
As celebrated as she is, Davis is also a polarising figure to some for her support of Communist regimes and advocating violence to fight political causes, earning her a year’s jail time in 1972. Such division over her continuing legacy further supports Berry’s case, though. The majority of great biopics focus on people who contain multitudes, and whether or not audiences applaud or decry Davis’ actions, her turbulent life at the centre of some of modern history’s biggest political battles has the potential to become similarly stimulating cinema.
Pushing an Angela Davis project forward could also be important beyond just Berry’s personal desires. Even with the number of biopic films being cranked out at higher and higher rates since the 2010s, not enough of them revolve around a female subject, and even less about women of colour. What better way to help address this imbalance than by putting two historic Black women together?
