14 DAY TRIAL // For many months now, Halle Berry has been arguing in court that it would be in her daughter’s best interest if she moved to France, thus taking her from her father, her ex, model Gabriel Aubry. She talks about that and much more with the New York Times.
All personal drama aside, Halle also talks about another subject that’s close to her heart: beauty / being considered beautiful and self-esteem.
The two are not connected and she is living proof of that, the stunning actress says. People looking in from the outside will never know what really happens inside a person’s heart.
“Just because they see my face doesn’t mean they see me. A person’s self-esteem has nothing to do with how she looks. If it’s true that I’m beautiful, I’m proof of that,” Halle says.
“Self-esteem comes from who you have in your life. How you were raised. What you struggled with as a child,” she adds.
She for one struggled with very low self-esteem when she was younger, mostly because she’s bi-racial and didn’t really know where she fit in at first.
Having a black father and a white mother, she always felt as if she was out of place and, as such, as if she had to go out of her way to prove her worth to everybody else.
“I always had to prove myself through my actions. Be a cheerleader. Be class president. Be the editor of the newspaper. It gave me a way to show who I was without being angry or violent. By the time I left school, I had a lot of tenacity. I’d turned things around,” Berry recalls.
“Being biracial is sort of like being in a secret society,” she says she found out later. “Most people I know of that mix have a real ability to be in a room with anyone, black or white.”
In the same interview, which is available in full here, Halle talks about her notorious ill luck in love, how her Oscar changed her (hint: it didn’t) and how she and Nahla, her daughter, would be better off outside the US, where the paparazzi aren’t ruining every moment of their life.