Halle bites back: The sassy actress on swimming with sharks, both in and out of the water

An October day in Warsaw, and the Polish glitterati are out in force at the capital’s Intercontinental Hotel as an armed police escort delivers the most exciting arrival from Hollywood for years. Even the chefs have come out of the kitchen to stare in wonderment at the pared-down beauty of Halle Berry who, panther-like in a skintight black Helmut Lang catsuit and gamine crop, makes every other woman present look overdressed.

Halle is here for the European launch of her third Coty perfume Reveal, looking just as sleek at 44 as when she played the title role of Catwoman six years ago. After becoming a mother for the first time at 41 when she had her daughter Nahla back in March 2008, she still has the willowy figure of a woman half her age. But there’s a good reason for that: ‘I exercise all the time because I’m diabetic,’ says Halle, who was diagnosed at 19 and was taking insulin until a change in her diet and exercise programme a few years ago enabled her to stabilise and stop taking the hormone.

It’s clear that this former beauty queen and ex-fashion model takes nothing in life for granted. The actress who was named Sexiest Woman Alive by Esquire in October 2008 just months after having her baby (and who broke an ageist taboo by admitting in the same magazine that she had far better orgasms in her 40s than her 20s) is still the only black woman to have won a Best Actress Oscar (for Monster’s Ball in 2002) and the first black girl to win the title of Miss Teen USA (1985) and represent the US in the Miss World contest (1986). Modelling became her stepping stone to acting, yet she remains sensitive about racism in Hollywood and elsewhere, having had to fight to win roles mainly intended for white actresses before making her breakthrough as a drug addict in Spike Lee’s 1991 film Jungle Fever.

Her determination to take risks has seen her accept diverse roles, from the mutant superheroine Storm in the X-Men franchise and Bond girl Jinx Johnson in Die Another Day to her nude scenes with a racist, played by Billy Bob Thornton, in Monster’s Ball. I wonder whether creating her own fragrances makes her feel more in control than she could ever be in an acting career that will always depend upon the parts she is offered and on getting the green light from risk-averse studio bosses. (She’s executive producer of the forthcoming film Frankie and Alice, in which she plays a woman suffering from a multiple-personality disorder, but it has taken her nine years to get it made.)

‘There’s no element of ever feeling in control for me,’ she says. ‘I put my heart and soul in a fragrance or a movie project and just hope that people will love them. But whether things turn out the way anybody hopes isn’t really the goal for me – I just like to challenge myself. Sometimes it scares me to death, but for me, it’s always about growing as an artist.’ Which is why she’s making her Broadway debut this autumn in The Mountaintop, set in a hotel room in 1968, the night before the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King (played by her Jungle Fever co-star Samuel L Jackson).

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