When Halle Berry manifested her greatest role: “Who knows? It might happen”
They say that detaching from your desire and just believing that what is meant for you will happen, you don’t need to dwell on it, and Halle Berry learned this when she vocalised her desire to star in a biopic about a Hollywood icon, a dream that eventually came true.
When you hear someone say ‘I’m manifesting it’, it can be easy to roll your eyes, but really, even while the idea of manifestation might feel a little ridiculous at times, at its core, it’s just an act of shifting your mindset into as positive a place as you can muster, and that can often conjure up some positive results.
Talking to The Virginian Pilot in 1995, a few years into her career as an actor following a successful tenure as a model (even winning ‘Miss World’ in 1986), Berry revealed the one role she would just die to play: “The life of Dorothy Dandridge is in the public domain, so it just depends on who does it first. I’d love to play her, and I’ve already learned that you can’t hope too big. Who knows? It might happen.”
She knew that nothing was off limits if she could go from working in a department store and entering beauty contests to starring in Hollywood movies alongside the likes of Patrick Swayze and even Elizabeth Taylor (courtesy of The Flintstones, funnily enough), so after sending out her wish into the universe, in just a few years, she was cast as Dandridge in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, which she also got to work on as an executive producer.
Dandridge was one of the first African American Hollywood icons, and her presence certainly contributed to the visibility of Black actors in the industry, which was saturated by, well, let’s be real, white men, which clearly made the story incredibly important to Berry.
Despite the fact that the Oscars had been established back in the late 1920s, Dandridge was the first Black woman to earn an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ for her performance in the Otto Preminger film Carmen Jones, a feat that didn’t occur until 1954.
Suffice it to say, Berry was thrilled to embody her in the television film, which would win her many awards, including a Golden Globe, and she was incredibly proud of her performance, as she should be, for bringing Dandridge to life beautifully. It’s not easy embodying someone who already had such a well-known screen presence, hence she called her turn one of her proudest achievements, once revealing, “When I think about my happiest moments, it was when that movie got made. After the first screening of it, I thought, ‘Wow! I had an idea, and we did it!’”
Bringing such a special and heartfelt project to reality was incredibly rewarding for Berry, and all because she set her sights on the film years before. and kept gunning for it, to the point where it seemed that there was no way she wasn’t going to play Dandridge, and luckily it all worked out perfectly.
