Halle Berry is, above all, smart. As a woman who has spent nearly four decades in the film industry, the Ohio native is fully aware that from a certain age, it is practically impossible for interviews not to bring up questions about aging, maturity, and new stages of life. The actress turns 60 this Friday, August 14, and, knowing that this milestone anniversary would give her visibility, she has taken the opportunity to capitalize on the media event with the launch of a vaginal moisturizing gel for menopausal women. Juicy like a peach is the result of the actress’s partnership with the intimate wellness brand Joylux, and its promotion is the perfect excuse to ask her how she feels about entering a new decade. “I feel very good about it. I feel like I am in the best moment of my life, as an actress and in everything I do. I have called this period ‘my best moment’ and I really believe it,” she said in a recent interview for Hello!
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Berry has been perfecting her answer to this question that she keeps getting for months. “When I was a child, thinking about 60 seemed very old to me, but now that I am about to turn 60, I don’t feel old at all. In fact, I feel better than I have in a very long time, I feel whole,” she clarified on the Today show at the end of May. No need to insist further. The Oscar-winning actress is at a great professional and personal moment, but above all, she looks calm. At 60, she enjoys a confidence that she projects in all her appearances, built throughout a life journey in which she has shown she is much more than just a physical appearance. Here are five reasons that support this.
1. From sixth place in Miss World to tenth highest-paid actress
Michelle Pfeiffer, Gal Gadot, Eva Longoria. All are actresses who were misses before starting their acting careers. Halle Berry also belongs to this category. The Bond girl was crowned Miss Ohio in 1986 — at 19 years old — after her boyfriend signed her up for the contest without her permission, and then she was a finalist in Miss USA. Months later, she became the first African American to represent her country in the Miss World contest, where she placed sixth. “I come from the world of beauty pageants and modeling, and when people found out about that, they immediately dismissed me as an actress,” she lamented in a 2016 interview with W Magazine.
She got her first film role with Spike Lee in Jungle Fever (1991). She played Vivian, a drug-addicted prostitute. “It was an incredible way to start my career,” she told W Magazine. Despite being a supporting character, Berry did not go unnoticed. After that, she was Bruce Willis’s protégée in The Last Boy Scout (1991), the reporter following Patrick Swayze in Father Hood (1993), or the secretary who seduces John Goodman in The Flintstones (1994).
Her big cinematic success came in the early 2000s, both in terms of professional recognition — she won the Oscar in 2002 for Monster’s Ball — and in increasing her fee — she earned 14 million dollars in 2004 for Catwoman. In 2007, after three films playing Storm in the X-Men series, she was the tenth highest-paid actress in the world, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film industry magazine estimated then that Berry earned an average of 10 million dollars per film. “When you know the work you are doing is worth more than what they are willing to pay you, ask for it. That’s when you have to be willing to walk away if they say no. We have to be aware of our value,” she told Forbes in 2017.
2. The only Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress
To date, 81 women have won the Oscar for Best Actress, but Halle Berry is the only African American — daughter of an African American father and a white mother — to have received this award. She marked this milestone in 2002. “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll [Black women previously nominated for the statuette]. It is for the women who are by my side, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it is for every anonymous Black woman who now has a chance because this door opened tonight,” she said emotionally in her acceptance speech. However, almost a quarter of a century later, she remains the only representative of this achievement.
“That Oscar didn’t change the course of my career. After winning it, I thought a truck full of scripts would appear at my doorstep,” she confessed in February to The Cut. “Although I felt tremendously proud, the next morning I was still Black. Directors kept saying: ‘If we put a Black woman in this role, what does that mean for the story overall? Do I have to choose a Black man? Then it would be a Black movie. And Black movies don’t sell overseas,” she criticized the lack of significant change in the industry.
In 2025, Cynthia Erivo — of Nigerian descent — was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress for Wicked — an award that Mikey Madison won for Anora — and Berry gave her advice before the gala, as revealed in this interview: “You really deserve it, but I don’t know if this will change your life. It can’t be the validation of what you do, okay?” For her, that validation has to come from within, a principle she has applied for decades.
3. Great sense of humor and strong activism
Catwoman was Berry’s most lucrative film, but also a resounding critical and box office failure. It grossed just over 82 million dollars against a budget of more than 100. “It was one of the highest salaries of my life and there’s nothing wrong with that… I don’t want to feel like I can only do award-worthy things,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2021. But her performance as the famous feline antiheroine did earn her an award: the Razzie for Worst Actress, and unlike most actors who receive this satirical award, she went to collect it. “No, I don’t have to return it, it has my name on it,” she joked with the audience while showing her Oscar. “I want to thank Warner Bros for putting me in a shitty, awful movie! It was exactly what my career needed, you know? I was at the top, and then Catwoman sank me to the bottom. I love it!” she continued, eliciting laughter from those present.
Berry has laughed and made others laugh in numerous interviews and social media posts, where she herself shares memes starring her. But she gets serious when needed and is also known for her strong activism. In 2006, for example, she led protests against the installation of a gas plant near a Malibu beach and succeeded in getting then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto the project. She is also an ambassador for the Jenesse Center, an NGO that supports victims of gender-based violence with which she actively collaborates.
The cause she has recently been devoted to is the defense of women’s health in middle age. In May 2024, she joined several senators at the United States Capitol to promote a law that would allocate 275 million dollars to research and medical education related to menopause. “We have to talk about this very normal part of our lives. Our doctors can’t even say the word, much less accompany us on the journey,” she criticized. In February 2025, she founded the telehealth platform Respin Health. “We accompany you in your process, offering you a personalized plan, a personal coach, access to specialists and hormone therapy, and a community of women, so you can take control of your menopause and keep thriving,” it describes on the website. Interested parties can become members for 15 dollars a month.
4. Four stormy relationships and a new love
Halle Berry is currently engaged to musician Van Hunt (56 years old), with whom she has been in a relationship for over six years. She herself confirmed the news last February on the Jimmy Fallon show: “There is some confusion that he proposed to me and I said no. That is not the case. I didn’t say no. We just don’t have a date.”
If the wedding ends up taking place, it will be Berry’s fourth. The first “I do” was with former baseball player David Justice (60 years old) in 1992. “She didn’t cook, didn’t clean, didn’t seem to have maternal instinct, and then we started having problems,” Justice said last year about the reasons for their breakup in 1996. The reasons behind the divorce from singer Eric Bénet (59 years old), to whom she was married from 2001 to 2005, are unbelievable. After publicly admitting to being unfaithful, Bénet entered a 35-day rehabilitation program for sex addiction. “I had a husband who said he was a sex addict, but I don’t believe that crap. That’s complete nonsense,” Berry said on the Armchair Expert podcast in 2024.
She married for the third time in 2013 to actor Olivier Martínez (60 years old), father of her son Maceo (12 years old). Their brief two-year marriage was nothing compared to the long divorce process, which lasted from 2015 to 2023. “Olivier continues to get into aggressive and unproductive arguments, which often end with him threatening and belittling me,” the actress stated in court. She had already gone through a similar process when she separated from model Gabriel Aubry (49 years old) in 2010. They never married but had a daughter, Nahla (18 years old). During custody trials, documents surfaced where Berry accused Aubry of psychological abuse, racist comments towards the child, and degrading behavior.
The actress has suffered abuse since childhood. “I grew up with an alcoholic and very abusive father, both verbally, emotionally, and physically,” she said about the man who abandoned her and her mother when Berry was a child. Still, she said she had forgiven him: “When he died, I got the gift of being able to talk to a spiritual healer and someone guided me through spiritual exercises to try to heal that wound I had with my father.”
5. She has survived being typecast as a sexy girl
Last Wednesday, two days before her official 60th birthday, Berry shared with her followers on Instagram — where she has 9.3 million followers — some photos showing her smiling, with her hair in the wind, surrounded by trees. “60, here I go…,” she wrote. The post has thousands of Likes. “Seeing you embrace this chapter, love, confidence, sensuality… is inspiring,” commented one user. Sensuality is an inseparable part of Berry. Many of her best-known roles are characterized by that ability to attract, with unforgettable scenes like her now iconic emergence from the sea in Die Another Day (2002), itself inspired by Ursula Andress’s historic appearance as Honey Rider in Dr. No (1962).
Still, the Ohio native, who currently has seven projects underway, has not let that define or limit her, and has shown she can adapt to any genre in thrillers, dramas, or comedies. She played a woman with dissociative identity disorder in Frankie and Alice (2010), a distressed mother in Kidnap (2017), or a down-and-out MMA fighter in Bruised (2020). The latter is produced, directed, and starred by Berry, who has had her own film and television company, HalleHolly, for years.
In her latest film, Escape Route, she plays an executive who suffers workplace discrimination and is made invisible by her company due to her age and being a woman, sexist prejudices she herself has been fighting against in Hollywood for years. “I think women have long felt defined by a number. And when that number increases, we are devalued,” she said during the film’s promotion. “I refuse to let something like that affect me because I am not ashamed of my age. That should be something I am proud of. I am still here. Aging is a blessing. It is a gift. I have a lot of wisdom and have learned a lot throughout my life. Now is not the time to get rid of me,” she warned.
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