Halle Berry storms Bond franchise

LOS ANGELES -- Halle Berry used to plead with filmmakers to look beyond her beauty and realize she could act. Now that she has an Academy Award to validate her dramatic talents, Berry's out to prove she knows how to kick butt, too.

After her anguished performance in the low-budget "Monster's Ball," Berry takes a sharp turn back to big-studio work as James Bond's latest love interest in "Die Another Day."

It could have been a step back, considering the number of past Bond heroines that served mainly as eye candy. But Berry figured it was the perfect career move given the tough resourcefulness of her Bond character, an American agent named Jinx.

"She's got a lot of the qualities of the ladies of the past. She's sexy, sure of her sexuality, knows how to use it. She's a great distraction for Bond when she needs to be," Berry said in an interview.

"But she's also pound for pound as strong as him in many ways. She is his equal because essentially, she has the same job he has."

With last year's "Monster's Ball," Berry, 34, became the first black to win a best-actress Oscar, playing a death row widow involved with a white ex-prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) who helped put her husband to death.

Though Berry had proven her acting skills in such films as "Losing Isaiah," "Bulworth" and her Emmy-winning performance in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," the former beauty queen and model again found herself at a disadvantage as "Monster's Ball" was being cast.

Berry had to talk "Monster's Ball" director Marc Forster into giving her the part.

"Nobody wanted me," Berry said. "I think he just thought I was too fragile. Everything he'd seen me in, from my Revlon commercials to the films and then when he met me in person, he just thought, she's too slight, too fragile. To his credit, he picked me even though he had a vision of what this woman looked like, and she just didn't look like me."

Born in Cleveland to a white mother and black father, Berry grew up in a single-parent home after her father abandoned the family. A beauty-pageant queen in her teens, Berry worked as a model then went into acting, doing a stint on "Knots Landing" in the early 1990s before breaking into films with Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever" in 1991. Other credits include "The Flintstones," "X-Men" and "Swordfish."

Buzz on her Bond character is so strong that distributor MGM has talked about creating a spinoff movie around Berry's Jinx. Berry brings humor, intelligence and strength to the role -- along with the more obvious traits required of Bond heroines.

"She's one fine-looking woman," said Pierce Brosnan, returning for his fourth outing as Bond. "She's a female Bond in this role. She's got the chops as an actress. She can do anything she wants."