Halle Berry talked about being raised by a white mother

As a young man, Halle Berry loved to watch successful black actors playing the leading roles in films and TV shows. Since Cat Woman star was created by a white mother, she longed to find people with whom she could really relate.

“It was very, very important,” explained Berry in the PBS documentary American Masters: what it’s like to be free. “I really struggled to find images of black women or people I could relate to.”

“Seeing Diahann Carroll as the star of a show and playing a mother who was a nurse, who was polite, who was beautiful, just reorganized me,” said Berry. “It made me realize that I was valuable and that I could turn to a woman every week who looked like who I would aspire to be when I grew up.”

“I was a black child being raised by a white woman, so I didn’t have these images in my home,” she said. “Finding them on television and in the movies has become very, very important to me.”

Carroll is acting in Julia made Berry want to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. And because of that, Berry is now one of the most successful actors.

When she appears in films, she tells other black children that they can do that too.