Academy Award for Best Actress

2001

Halle Berry 

as

Leticia Musgrove

Monster's Ball

Halle Maria Berry (born Maria Halle Berry; August 14, 1966) is an American actress and former fashion model. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2002 for her performance in the romantic drama Monster's Ball (2001), which made her the only woman of color to win a Best Actress Oscar to date, as of 2015.

Berry was one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood during the 2000s and has been involved in the production of several of the films in which she performed. She is also a Revlon spokes model. Before becoming an actress, she started modeling and entered several beauty contests, finishing as the 1st runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant and coming in 6th place in the Miss World Pageant in 1986. Her breakthrough film role was in the romantic comedy Boomerang (1992), alongside Eddie Murphy, which led to roles in films such as the comedy The Flintstones (1994), the political comedy-drama Bulworth (1998) and the television film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), for which she won the Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress, among many other awards.

In addition to her Academy Award win, Berry garnered high-profile roles in the 2000s such as Storm in the X-Men film series (beginning in 2000), the action crime thriller Swordfish (2001), and the spy film Die Another Day (2002), where she played Bond Girl Jinx. She then appeared in the X-Men sequels, X2: X-Men United (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). In the 2010s, she appeared in movies such as the science fiction film Cloud Atlas (2012), the crime thriller The Call (2013) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014).

Divorced from baseball player David Justice and singer-songwriter Eric Benét, Berry has a daughter by model Gabriel Aubry, and a son by actor Olivier Martinez.