Oprah Winfrey Was Once Worried That Winning an Oscar Changed Halle Berry
Oprah Winfrey and X-Men star Halle Berry have both been close with each other over the years. But Winfrey became hesitant to approach the actor for a future film project after Berry’s Oscar win.
Oprah Winfrey was scared of approaching Halle Berry after she won an Oscar for ‘Monster’s Ball’
Berry made history when she won an Oscar for Best Lead Actress for her 2001 film Monster’s Ball. Apart from it being her first win, Berry also became the first black woman to win a best actor award at the prestigious ceremony. But Berry asserted that winning the Oscar, although life-changing, initally had little affect on her film career. She was surprised she wasn’t offered other film opportunities afterwards.
“Because I thought they were going to just back up the truck and drop them off at my house, right? When you have a historic win like that, you think, ‘Oh, this is going to fundamentally change.’ It did fundamentally change me, but it didn’t change my place in the business overnight. I still had to go back to work. I still had to try to fight to make a way out of no way,” she once told Entertainment Weekly.
Still, at the time her friend Winfrey was concerned that Berry might have experienced a profound change after winning the award. This discouraged Winfrey from approaching Berry for the television movie Their Eyes Were Watching God, which Winfrey produced.
“I don’t know what happens to you once you win an Academy Award. I didn’t know whether she was going to be, like: ‘Now I have an Oscar. I’m sorry. I cannot talk to you,’” Winfrey once said according to Irish Examiner.
Halle Berry felt her Oscar win ultimately meant nothing
Berry has been very outspoken recently about how disappointing her Oscar win was in the grand scheme of things. Although winning it made for a very memorable moment, Berry felt it facilitated very little actual change in the industry. Especially in regards to the film careers of her contemporaries.
“It didn’t open the door,” Berry told the New York Times about her Oscar win. “The fact that there’s no one standing next to me is heartbreaking.”
The Bruised star lamented over the fact that she was still the only black female actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She believed the lack of diversity among Oscar winners might have taken some of the power away from her own Oscar speech.
“That meant nothing. I thought it meant something, but I think it meant nothing,” she said in an interview with Teen Vogue.
Still, she acknowledged that winning an Oscar as a black female actor meant several factors had to align at the precise moment.
“For a woman of color to win, the film itself has to be a good movie and meet the sensibility of academy members,” she said. “And the performance has to be good.”
Oprah Winfrey called winning her Oscar ‘unimaginable’
Winfrey would eventually receive her own Academy Award. The media mogul received a Governors Award from the academy, which is usually given to those who’ve made significant contributions to the film industry. It was a win that Winfrey described as unimaginable.
“It’s unimaginable that I would be standing before you, voted by the Board of Governors,” she said in her Oscars speech. “It’s unimaginable. It’s unimaginable. It’s unimaginable. It is unimaginable! And so when I say thank you, the thank you comes from a place deeper than even I know, Sharon [Stone]. Even deeper than I know. Because it’s not just from me, it’s from everybody who made me possible.”
