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Though there is no paucity of scholarship and reportage bearing out the conventional wisdom that attractive people enjoy various personal and professional advantages not extended to less-pretty folk, there is evidence in Hollywood that extraordinarily beautiful performers -- though prized for their pulchritude, as are all pretty people in Hollywood -- face an uphill battle in proving they have legitimate, serious acting chops. Certainly, this has been one of the challenges Halle Berry has faced in her career -- the fact that she's so unbelievably beautiful that one automatically assumes she must be as model-stupid as she is model-pretty.
Granted, the handicap (or, really, the "handicap") of otherworldly physical beauty has not been the only speed bump on Berry's road to success. There's the fact that she started her career on a short-lived teeny-bopper sitcom (the Who's The Boss? spin-off Living Dolls -- and yes, I am actually old enough to remember it). There's the fact of her race, which -- except when she's fortunate enough to meet with forward-thinking directors willing to cast her in roles for which the character's race is irrelevant -- requires her to compete against her peers for the miniscule number of substantial parts for young African-American women. Oh, and it didn't help matters any when she was in that hit-and-run a couple of years back, either.
2001 has been a good year for Berry, both as an actor, and as a famous person. She helped to turn Swordfish, which otherwise would have been an entirely forgettable summer action thriller (or rather, "action" "thriller") into the subject of innumerable magazine stories, newspaper articles, and Entertainment Tonight segments by agreeing to an utterly and undeniably gratuitous shot of her bare breasts. For those of you reading who didn't see Swordfish -- and I fervently hope that's most of you, because like so many movies built around John Travolta, it sucks -- believe me when I tell you that the scene in which Berry appears topless is the most memorable thing about the movie. The reason, I think, is because the scene does not advance the plot (or, more accurately, the...never mind, you get it) or require the actors to speak any embarrassingly amateurish dialogue or depict John Travolta; the scene exists for no reason other than to expose Berry's bosom to the camera -- and to hear the way people talked about Swordfish at the time (and even now, close to a year later), it almost seems as though the entire film exists to provide a pretext for the exposure of Berry's breasts. (And, in case you're wondering, just like the rest of her, Berry's breasts are lovely.)
That event did more to keep Berry's name in the news than her winning a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, and an Emmy for her titular role in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Later in 2001, Berry trumped her Swordfish buzz with her masterful performance in Monster's Ball. To play Leticia Musgrove, wife of a Death Row inmate, Berry glams way down and convincingly inhabits the skin of a woman who has given up on happiness and hope. The famously beautiful Berry acts ugly, abusing her character's obese son in a scene that's particularly difficult to watch. Leticia loses everything, finally, but finds love with Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), one of her husband's prison guards. Critics of the film have bristled at the contrived coincidences of the story, but Berry's performance has received nothing but praise, earning her an Oscar nomination and, last weekend, a Best Actress SAG Award -- the first major pre-Oscar award Sissy Spacek, star of In the Bedroom, has lost this year.
Though now we all know for sure that Berry can act, with the exception of Dandridge and Monster's Ball, her résumé is littered with flops and humiliations. Yes, of course, when one is starting out, one may take a role just for the money -- hence Father Hood and The Last Boy Scout. But even if Berry hadn't just been coming off her assured performance in Losing Isaiah, there would be no excuse for the likes of B*A*P*S. Similarly, Berry followed Dandridge by playing Storm in X-Men -- and while we can't possibly deny that X-Men was a hit, we hope the producers get a better script doctor for the sequel. Some actors are in their element convincingly delivering terrible dialogue (hello, Harrison Ford), whereas others have no facility for selling shitty lines (it's all about you, Natalie Portman), and poor Berry should have workshopped her line reading a bit longer before shooting the "Do you know what hapens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else" scene. We know she didn't write it, but that doesn't prevent her from being guilty by association for an inductee in the Bad Movie Quote Hall of Fame.
While there may have been a time when Berry's physical attributes kept her from portraying compelling yet unattractive characters, her Oscar nomination for Monster's Ball has brought that time to an end. Furthermore, managing to net a Best Actress (as opposed to Best Supporting Actress) nomination initiates her into a tiny sorority of African-American actresses recognized in the history of the Academy Awards. Halle Berry is indisputably one of the finest actresses of colour working today; after Monster's Ball, we think Hollywood may finally be ready to count her among the best actresses of her generation, full stop.
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