Halle Berry | Mario Testino | Vogue Sept 2010 | Ravishing Orchid in the Prime of Life

Photographed by Mario Testino, Halle Berry gives her first interview in three years to Vogue’s Jonathan Van Meter for the September 2010 issue. Halle Berry is the first woman of color to front cover US Vogue in September, considered the biggest issue of the year.

Speaking candidly, Halle Berry says she’s tired of media misperceptions of her.

“That I am this brooding, twisted, lovesick person who just can’t get it right in life. Every story about me is so heavy and dramatic. That’s not how I do life. But that’s the impression people have, and that’s what keeps getting reiterated. As if I’m still stuck in all the muck of the past. And I am so not.”

Admitting that she has discussed her trials and tribulations publicly, Halle Berry is annoyed that the public doesn’t want to believe that she has evolved as a woman, grown as a human being.

At age 44, Halle Berry maintains a grueling five-day a week exercise routine with Gunnar Peterson.

Vogue takes us to Berry’s home in Malibu, off the Pacific Coast Highway, for dinner with the photographer Cliff Watts, one of Berry’s best friends, Patrick Delanty, the interior designer who decorated this house with Berry when she bought it seven years ago; and Karen Earl and Avis Frazier-Thomas, the executive director and the president of the board of directors of the Jenesse Center, the domestic violence-intervention organization with which Berry is very involved.

The actress became intimately involved with the Jenesse Center as part of her public-service sentence for leaving the scene of a traffic accident in 2000. The oldest domestic-violence center in South LA occupies the number two spot in Halle Berry’s heart. First place belongs to her daughter Nahla.

Halle Berry on Naked Women

We regard this Smart Sensuality woman with awe, and Berry doesn’t let us down in the art department.

There is also surprising art: mostly modern painting and sculpture, a lot of it of a sexual nature. In her living room there is a very tall statue by Curt Brill of a naked woman looking out to sea. “I love the naked female form,” she says. “I just feel like that’s the most empowered position you can be in. She is standing tall in all her nakedness, and she is just commanding the room. Everything revolves around her in the house. I love it.” via Vogue.com

In a suprising admission, Halle Berry says that if the world wouldn’t persecute her, she would take nude photos every day of the week. She shares a marvelous story of being eight months pregnant on the beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with Cliff.

And I was like, ‘I’m going to take my clothes off,’ and he was like, ‘No, HB, don’t!’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck it! Take the picture!’ And I took my clothes off and I just ran down the beach.” She laughs at the thought. “I could not have been happier in my life.” via Vogue.com

Halle Berry’s New Films

Halle Berry’s career is back in high gear. She speaks of two films “Dark-Ride” which she refers to as “the shark movie,” which involves great whites, a bad husband, and all manner of undersea scuba action. Immediately afterward, she will begin shooting another film, Shoe Addicts Anonymous, that she describes as like “The First Wives Club”—but about shoes. “Shoes are sort of a metaphor for these women all coming together and dealing with who they are—in their 30s and 40s.”

Halle Berry is producing her first film called “Frankie and Alice”, based on a true 1970s story of a ghetto stripper who suffers multiple-personality disorders.

Stellan Skarsgård costars as the shrink who helps her come to grips with her disorder—a character based on the real Dr. Oscar Janiger, famous for his association with the Beats; he wrote the story before he died in 2001.

Berry, who had been trying to figure out how to get the film made for nine years. After seeing “Tipping the Velvet”, a three-hour Victorian-lesbian drama directed by Geoffrey Sax, on the BBC, and hired him for “Frankie and Alice”.

Halle Berry in “The Mountaintop”

Holding a professional dance card that’s really full, Halle Berry shares the news that she will appear for the first tiem on Broadway in 2011, in Katori Hall’s two-person play “The Mountaintop”, with Samuel L. Jackson and directed by Kenny Leon.

The play is focused on the last night of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, life, with Berry playing a kind of imaginary chambermaid/angel. Not having been onstage in 20 years, the actress describes mindset as “Terrified is putting it lightly.”

Halle Berry on Romance and Love

The tabloids are finally coming to grips with the fact that Halle Berry’s breakup with Gabriel Aubry is friendy. Berry is not only circumspect but reflective on a quality that some women have, in talking about her pursuit of romance.

Rejecting the idea that love, romance and children belong in the same family unit, Hale Berry emphasizes that she and Aubry have created a marvelous child and they are mutually committed to her development.

“We have always been friends, we’re still friends, we love each other very much, and we both share the love of our lives. And we are both 100 percent committed to being the best parents we can be. And while it was not a love connection for us, he was absolutely the right person to have this child with because she is going to have an amazing father. And that was really important to me. We’ll make sure we always do what is right for her and put her first. And she will see as she grows that we have a lot of love for each other.” via Vogue.com

This bonafide Smart Sensuality woman emphasizes that she is still searching for love, and she will not settle. Sharing her wisdom, Halle Berry suggests that the real love of her life is her dauaghter and that she doesn’t really believe in the Mayberry vision of love, romance and family created by American culture. “As much as I have always wanted to be in this committed relationship and have the picket fence and grow old with the same person, I’m coming to terms with: Maybe that’s just not who I am.”

Halle Berry says she’s taking her daughter Nahla to San Francisco in an attempt to keep her out of the public eye. She may even move there full time, to keep out of the LA photographic fishbowl.

In a week where Jennifer Aniston has incurrend the wrath of Bill O’Reilly for suggesting that perhaps an in-house man isn’t a prerequisite for having children, Halle Berry seems to be rowing in the same serene waters.

We support Halle Berry’s frustration that this talented woman is viewed as the neurotic, scarred female who can’t get things right.

From the point of view of her Vogue interview, it seems that Halle Berry’s doing better than ever. Her lifestyle emerges as a pattern chosen by increasing numbers of women, who refuse to wrap up their lives in one perfect, blemish-free package that plays to high ratings in America’s conservative, prime-time psyche but frequently fails miserably on the playing field of real life.