Halle Berry (Ohio, 59 years old) was . It was in 2002, for his role in Monsters’s Ball. For most, it comes with new opportunities on screens, but . “The Oscar didn’t necessarily change the course of my career. After winning it, I thought something like a truck full of scripts was going to appear parked in front of my front door,” he recalls in a recent interview with who remains the only black woman to win in that category. “Even though I was immensely proud, the next morning I was still a black woman. The directors kept saying, ‘If we put a black woman in this role, what does that mean for the whole story? Do I have to cast a black man? Then it’s a black film. Black films don’t sell abroad,’ she adds.
The actress believes that throughout her career she has felt very misunderstood and – she has been divorced three times – that she has made sensational headlines on numerous occasions over and above her work. Berry, who will turn 60 next August, spoke with The Cut about her long career in the world of cinema, about growing up in the industry and about menopause.
Berry considers that her career cost her more work because she is a black woman, and precisely because of her experience she was encouraged to give advice to , who has been nominated for an Oscar three times and twice for best actress, the last ones in the last awards season for her role as Elphaba in the first installment of Wicked: “You deserve it, but I don’t know if it’s going to change your life. It can’t be validation of what you do.”
The actress, who has accumulated 45 films in her filmography, is about to release her latest film, . A film in which she has decided to speak through her character about another aspect of life that women face: menopause. Berry plays a sexy insurance broker named Sharon Coombs, who shows off her cleavage to close deals with multi-millionaire clients. In one scene, Sharon’s boss makes fun of her age. “His character was very real to me. You reach an age where you feel that you are being marginalized, that you are devalued. You notice it at work. You notice it in society,” he says in the conversation with The Cut. “But I have firmly decided that I am not going to allow myself to be erased. That is why I am on my menopause mission. I am going to be louder than ever.”
The actress plans to dedicate her “second act” to this cause. In 2020 she founded a health platform focused on menopause care, which in 2025 evolved into . “It is a start-up“But women are just as confused as I am on this midlife journey and I felt like I had to do something.”
The actress wants to normalize the symptoms of this life stage, such as vaginal dryness: “Look, it happens to more than 60% of women as we age. Everything dries up! If we talk about it and laugh, there is no longer any shame or embarrassment,” she explains in the magazine. Her for a pain similar to a urinary infection, after having sexual relations. Three days later they confirmed that it was not a sexually transmitted infection, but rather a lack of estrogen that caused vaginal atrophy. A story that he has told on television on different occasions and with which he seeks to normalize and talk more about this stage.
Neither she nor her team were very sure about this strategy at first and were worried that sharing their route could harm their career. “My first reaction was, ‘But as a black woman, it’s always been an uphill battle,’ right? I wasn’t afraid at all. ‘Let’s do it,’ I thought.” “As a black woman, now almost 60 years old, I can still work in film and do what I love,” she says. “I am succeeding.”
