The first black woman to win the best actress Oscar, Halle Berry, has described the current storm over racial diversity in Hollywood as “heartbreaking”.
Berry, who won the top prize in 2002 for her turn as a poor southern woman who falls for Billy Bob Thornton’s troubled prison guard in Monster’s Ball, said she never imagined the door she opened would remain shut for the next 14 years.
“Honestly, that win almost 15 years ago was iconic,” Berry said, on stage at the Makers Conference in Los Angeles. “It was important to me, but I had the knowing in the moment that it was bigger than me. I believed in that moment when I said: ‘The door tonight has been opened.’ I believed with every bone in my body that this was going to incite change because this door, this barrier, had been broken.”
In her tearful acceptance speech in 2002, Berry suggested her win might open the floodgates for black actors to find success in Hollywood. “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll,” she said. “It’s for the women that stand beside me – Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of colour that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”
On stage in Los Angeles yesterday, she said: “To sit here almost 15 years later, and knowing that another woman of colour has not walked through that door, is heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking, because I thought that moment was bigger than me. It’s heartbreaking to start to think maybe it wasn’t bigger than me. Maybe it wasn’t. And I so desperately felt like it was.”
The current row over diversity in Hollywood was sparked on 14 January after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to nominate a single actor from black or ethnic minority backgrounds for the Oscars for a second year running. Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith and Tyrese Gibson are among the African American stars to have signalled that they would not be attending this year’s ceremony or to have called for a boycott.
The Academy has since announced radical rule changes aimed at doubling voting representation among female and ethnic minority demographics by 2020. But a number of high-profile African American figures, including Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg and 2012 best actress nominee Viola Davis, have indicated the issue goes beyond awards ceremonies to the heart of the Hollywood decision-making process.
Berry, for her part, accused Hollywood of failing in its basic duty to faithfully portray the American existence. “It’s really about truth-telling,” she said. “And as film-makers and as actors, we have a responsibility to tell the truth. The films, I think, coming out of Hollywood aren’t truthful. And the reason they’re not truthful, these days, is that they’re not really depicting the importance and the involvement and the participation of people of colour in our American culture.”
