One of Halle's big stepping stones was the Miss Teen All-American Pageant, captured in these rare photos of Halle winning the title, provided by the Miss Teen All-American Pageant photo archives. (Right) Halle winning her Oscar. ©2002 ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES

Hotter than a cosmic fireball, Halle Berry is a former beauty queen blazing across the film firmament with a history-making Oscar in tow. How did a pageant girl from Cleveland turn into a Hollywood supernova? Glad you should ask.

By Fred Abel

We just can't get enough of Halle Berry lately. And who could blame us? Certainly, we feel so strongly in no small measure due to her incomparable beauty. And now that she's at the pinnacle of movie success, with her Oscar for Monster's Ball, we only want more of her. For her fans and the press, there's no such thing as too much of a good thing when it comes to Halle Berry.

Yet by late spring, Halle had escaped the media hoard here in the U.S. She was off in some Spanish hotel during shooting for her next movie, the James Bond flick Die Another Day. Nevertheless, The Halle Berry Story is as hot as ever — a summer sizzler with great "legs," both physically and in the box-office meaning of the term. In the space of a year, this 35-year-old actress, stereotype buster, and object of rampant curiosity has leaped from modest former beauty pageant winner with acting talent to international movie stardom. Which raises an urgent question for us pageant fans: How did this nice Miss Teen All American, Miss Ohio USA, and first runner-up at Miss USA 1986 manage to climb to a mountaintop where no pageant beauty queen or black woman has ever stood before?

'I wanted to do a film first that would prove that I really am an actress.' — Halle Berry

Part of the answer to that question lies in Halle herself. Talented actresses come and go, but by this summer, no one doubts Halle Berry has set a new standard for the female film superstar. Body and soul, she embodies a knockout combination -- a gorgeous, graceful goddess with natural acting instincts, pulse-quickening sex appeal, and the heart of a vulnerable child. Women want to befriend or mother her; men just adore her. Yet, unlike so many would-be screen sirens these days, Halle has willingly jettisoned her makeup case for roles, like the one she assumes in Monster's Ball, that play against her well-refined features. Her manager, Vincent Cirrincione, recalls telling her the film's producers "don't even want you. They're so against you I don't even want to tell you." But they fought for and won the part, and Halle recently told a British interviewer, "I'm pretty much used to the fight. That's pretty much what my career has been about."

The beauty-queen-as-underdog formula works. It's turned the polite pageant-princess into a tenacious actress — allowing her to overcome a decade-long thicket of forgettable film features (Strictly Business, The Last Boy Scout, and B*A*P*S come to mind) while deftly fielding meatier roles in such less-commercial-but-artistically-fulfilling films as Jungle Fever, Losing Isaiah, Bulworth, and the Emmy-award-winning HBO movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, which she also produced.

Yet by March of this year, as she was poised at the film actor's Promised Land, having been nominated for an Oscar for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role for her part as Leticia Musgrove in Monster's Ball, her ascension to the Academy of Arts and Sciences throne was far from a foregone conclusion. No black actress before her, including Academy Awards show host Whoopi Goldberg, had been given the best actress prize for a leading role. Nor had any former pageant beauty queen, for that matter. Her winning the Oscar was nothing short of unprecedented. Talk about breaking through a glass ceiling!

Halle's comments after she won the Oscar sought to put the moment in its historic context. She caught her breath, composed herself, and graciously said: "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me: Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it's for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."

Halle is a 17-year-old queen in these 1985 Teen All American Pageant images.

However scripted that acknowledgment may have sounded, standing before Hollywood's elite as an Oscar-night honoree must have been one performance that never entered the imagination of the young Halle Berry. There were, after all, so many obstacles blocking her view of the future. Born Aug. 14, 1968, in Cleveland to a black father, Jerome Berry, and white mother of English decent, Judith, Halle spent her early childhood in a neighborhood of mostly poor black households, according to several published accounts of her childhood. Her father left home when Halle was 4, and after a time, Judith, a psychiatric nurse, moved her and Halle's older sister, Heide, into a more-affluent, predominately-white suburb. Even that economic improvement had its drawbacks. "I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood, so I felt like I just didn't fit in, like I wasn't as good as everybody else or as smart," Halle told an interviewer for Seventeen magazine. Children even targeted certain physical features of hers for ribbing; she says kids at school would call her "Pug Nose" or "Buttons" because of the shape of her nose. Halle credits a fifth-grade teacher, Yvonne Simms, with providing emotional support throughout grade school, and says her mother gave her "life, love, and everything" she needed to weather those early rough spots.

By high school, Halle had grown into a teen standout. At Cleveland's Bedford High, she was a member of the honor society, editor of the school newspaper, a cheerleader, and prom queen. Halle entered a national pageant in Miami run by veteran pageant expert Frank Sweeney, the Miss Teen All American pageant, which has developed a reputation over the years for discovering "stars of tomorrow." Winning the Miss Teen All American title gave Halle her first taste of what it would be like in the public spotlight.

Her mother Judith had raised Halle to excel beyond anyone's expectations, basing that viewpoint on recognition that her daughter might face prejudice as an African-American. Even right out of high school, Halle showed confidence that her beauty and brains could overcome preconceptions and brighten her future. Winning the Teen All American Pageant only reinforced that conclusion. A year later, Halle was back in competition, entering and winning the Miss Ohio USA pageant. Halle's public life was christened on a national television stage when she finished in the limelight as first runner-up at the 1986 Miss USA finals (Christy Fichtner of Texas won). Her appearance in the Miss World Pageant that same year resulted in third runner-up recognition. The pageant whirlwind ended with Halle's invitation to join a three-week tour of seven countries with the first Bob Hope Miss USA/USO tour.

The Oscar is ... just part of her journey toward becoming an international movie star.' — Vincent Cirrincione

Back home and with her mother's blessings, Halle began her college studies at Cuyahoga Community College as a broadcast journalism major. But pageant success at age 17 and the audience adulation from the USO tour proved stronger than the promise of someday anchoring Cleveland's 6 o'clock news, because Halle moved to Chicago, at the urging of a modeling talent scout, and began a successful transition to stardom. What followed Halle's pageant high points were the typical trials of beautiful females who want the world to take them seriously — learning to manage the art of self-discovery and professional perseverance. Her decade-long odyssey required that she take numerous risks — leaving home, finding employers and agents she could trust, giving up large portions of free time to take acting classes — in the span of only a few years in her early 20s. Even for someone as beautiful as Halle, those weren't easy tasks.

While in Chicago, an audition for a Charlie's Angels special pilot sent Halle to Los Angeles, where she received encouragement from the legendary TV producer Aaron Spelling, who recommended that she get a top-notch manager. As sometimes happens in success stories such as this one, coincidence intervened and Halle's happy Hollywood fate was sealed when a Miss Teen All American videotape was viewed by then Brooklyn-based personal manager Vincent Cirrincione. He was so impressed, he tracked her down and invited her to New York for auditions and screen tests. To this day, Halle considers Cirrincione to be like a father to her — someone who has been the greatest single impetus behind her career ascent.

But even with professional guidance on her side, Halle would bear an extra burden, trying to kick-start an acting career as a black woman vying for a miniscule number of roles for African-American actresses. Halle's early successes went to the pageant queen -- winning a part in the 1989 TV comedy series Living Dolls and then a recurring role in the 1991-92 prime-time soap Knots Landing. But perhaps most telling of all her early breaks was Halle's daring acceptance of Spike Lee's invitation to appear in his 1991 feature film, the comedy Jungle Fever. Her part, as the foul-mouthed crack-head companion to a character played by Samuel L. Jackson, was tailor-made to dispel the "former-beauty-queen-turned-clueless-actress" stereotype. Halle remembers intending the audacious choice to impact the way Hollywood producers perceived her. "I wanted to do a film first that would prove that I really am an actress," she said in a 1998 Entertainment Weekly interview, "so I wouldn't get stereotyped right off as just another pretty face."

Whether that is true, or whether giving Halle Berry that part was simply Spike Lee's gift to a very beautiful, if raw, talent, we may never know. What we do know is this: Halle Berry showed a lot of moxie, not only in the way she plunged into the real world of crack addicts in preparing for the Jungle Fever role, but also in how, during the next 10 years, she took advantage of her commercial feature-film supporting roles even as she refined her acting skills and persona both on and off-screen. Parts such as Eddie Murphy's love interest in Boomerang and the live-action comic book characters in X-Men and The Flintstones brought her not only a movie star's paycheck but also a growing awareness of her own capabilities as an artist that would help her in producing Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and winning the part in Monster's Ball.

Here she appears with husband Eric Benet (left) and (right) as teen winner. © A.M.P.A.S.

But by the mid-1990s, Halle's transformation from pageant queen to motion-picture prodigy was subjected to numerous disappointments. Roles that escaped Halle's grasp included the lead in Indecent Proposal (Demi Moore was cast instead, opposite Robert Redford) and the megahit Silence of the Lambs (Jodie Foster got the nod, opposite Anthony Hopkins). She turned down the lead role as Tina Turner in the 1994 bio-pic What's Love Got To Do With It (Angela Bassett took it), reportedly because she had already played an abused woman in the miniseries Queen. And she passed up the female lead in the thriller Speed, the role that skyrocketed Sandra Bullock's box-office stock.

If playing the title role in The Halle Berry Story has not been her greatest performance to date, it is only because the part is still in rewrite. She has found more than two years of stable married life with Benet, who she says is "the right person for me. And he's very supportive." Halle also has spread her maternal wings as stepmother to Benet's 10-year-old daughter, India, and of that role she says, "I'm fulfilled. That maternal thing has been fed... If I have [a child] of my own body, it won't mean any more to me than she does... I'm very much a mother, and I feel connected in a very real way."

With Halle's success has come a growing fearlessness as an artist willing to fight for roles nobody sees her playing. Explains one former doubter, Monster's director Marc Forster: "As a beautiful woman like [Halle], it's much harder to earn and get your respect." Halle says she can identify with the character of Leticia Musgrove in part because, as a black woman, she felt she understood her struggle —"like most women who have had ups and downs, highs and lows, who have struggled at certain times in my life to understand who I am, to make ends meet, to make my way."

Halle's courage has allowed her to tackle head-on the intimate scenes with Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball, and she has explained her exposure as pivotal to reinforcing not only the character's emotional vulnerability but also the gritty, unflinching movie's mood. "If [viewers] see that scene and see titillation, they've missed the point," she told one interviewer.

That kind of commitment and passion for perfection has resulted in an Emmy for Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, and honors for her job in Monster's Ball from the Screen Actor's Guild, the National Board of Review, the Foreign Press' (Golden Globe), as well as the Oscar voters. The golden statue alone increased the film's box office by one-third the week after the Academy Awards-show telecast, People magazine reported, and Halle now could command a $6-to-$8-million paycheck for the right film. "The Oscar is not the end of the road or the beginning," says her manager, Vincent Cirrincione. "It's just part of her journey toward becoming an international movie star."

While she worked for Actor's Equity-scale wages to do Monster's Ball, Halle will get $4 million for her stint in Die Another Day. That movie, scheduled to arrive in theaters in November, casts Halle as the latest in a long line of Bond bad girls. But, true to form, Halle is finding new ways to care about such projects, at one point telling reporters that her Die Another Day performance would redefine the way we think about the Bond bad-girl role.

Of course, few will doubt her now. Halle Berry's secret of success is no secret any longer. She is a multi-talented woman who fought the good fight, overcame the odds, competed and won, and never gave up — in other words, a pageant-toughened beauty queen with a history-making Oscar to show for the effort.

Way to go, Halle!

To read more stories like this one, subscribe to Pageantry TODAY!