Halle Berry had almost written herself off.
It was a cold March night in Hollywood in 2002, and she was thrilled to have been nominated for her first Oscar, in the Best Actress category, for her role as a waitress who has an affair with her convicted husband’s executioner in the Marc Forster’s dark drama “The past condemns us”.
With rivals such as Nicole Kidman (“Moulin Rouge”), Judi Dench (“Iris”), Sissy Spacek (“The Unforgivable Crime”) and Renée Zellweger (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”), Berry was the seventh African-American actress nominated. A win would go down in history as the first black winner.
However, Berry never thought it would happen.
“In those days, if you didn’t win the Globe, you didn’t get the Oscar,” Berry, 55, said in a recent phone conversation, referring to the Golden Globe he had lost to Spacek. “So I had more or less resigned myself to believing this: ‘It’s great to be here, but I’m not going to win.'”
However, the then previous year’s winner, Russell Crowe, opened the envelope and read his name, and the camera zoomed in on his teary and surprised face. He took a moment to compose herself, and then headed onto the stage in her already iconic Elie Saab dress, a voluminous burgundy train trailing behind her, as the applause went on and on and on.
“My God”, were his first words when he finally had enough breath to speak, with tears still running down his cheeks and his hands shaking as he took the statuette. He had not prepared a speech. He didn’t have a list of people to thank either.
“I have no recollection of the moment,” Berry said. “I don’t even know how I got there. It was a moment of total blackout. The only thing I remember is Russell Crowe saying: ‘Breathe, friend’. And then I had a gold statue in my hand, and I just started talking.”
He dedicated the moment to Dorothy Dandridge, who in 1955 became the first African-American woman nominated for best actress (for “Carmen Jones”), and to previous African-American nominees such as Diahann Carroll and Angela Bassett.
“This moment is so much bigger than me,” Berry told the crowd, adding, “It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because a door has been opened tonight.”
At one point, he looked out onto the balcony and saw Sidney Poitier, who in 1964 became the first black man to win an Oscar for best actor, for “Lilies of the Valley,” and who was there that night to receive a honorary award.
“It was very special to have him there,” Berry said in an interview, weeks after he died in January at age 94. “He and Dorothy Dandridge allowed me to dream outside my own backyard and believe that a little black girl from Cleveland could do it.”
When the orchestra told him to finish after almost three minutes, he resisted.
“It’s been 74 years,” he said onstage, referring to all the ceremonies where a white actress had won the award. “I have to take this time.” (It would be a night of long speeches, which would become the longest Oscars in history, at 4 hours and 23 minutes.)
Moments later, the night was again part of the history books: Denzel Washington became the second African-American man to win the award for best actor, for his role as a corrupt police officer in “Training Day”, turning the 2002 ceremony the first—and only—time the top two acting awards went to actors of color.
But in the twenty years since that night, only twelve other black performers have won an Oscar. Although two men — Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker — have joined the ranks of African-American best actor winners, no other black woman has been named best actress, and it took eight years after Berry’s win for another. black woman was even nominated in the category (Gabourey Sidibe for “Preciosa” in 2010).
“The door didn’t open,” Berry said. “The fact that there is no other winner is heartbreaking.”
Mia L. Mask, a film professor at Vassar College and author of “Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film,” said Berry’s win was especially notable because it came amid a shortage of quality roles for black men, and even more so for black women.
“For a woman of color to win, the movie has to be a good movie and satisfy the sensibilities of the members of the academy,” she explained. “AND the acting has to be good.”
Berry said that while she celebrated her historic win, she was determined not to let it change the types of roles she took on.
“You have to stay true to whatever got you there to get that award,” he said. “And for me, it was taking risks and doing things that were out of the ordinary.”
But, Berry stressed, the fact that no African-American has won the academy’s top acting award for women in the past two decades shouldn’t take anything away from women like Lena Waithe and Viola Davis, who are producing “wonderful, miraculous work.” ”.
“We can’t always judge success or progress by how many awards we have,” he said. “Awards are the icing on the cake, it’s your peers saying you were exceptionally excellent that year, but does that mean if we don’t get the exceptionally excellent nod, we weren’t great and we won’t succeed, and we’re not changing the world with our art, and our opportunities are not growing?
Even more important than the statuette in her bedroom, Berry said, is the work she has been able to do in the years since. She recently directed her first film, the mixed martial arts drama “Wound,” which began streaming on Netflix in November.
“Twenty years ago, would there have been a black woman directing a movie about the fighting genre?” he asked. “I don’t think she could have even considered that idea. That is proof to me that things are changing.”