Halle Berry covers the New York Times Style Magazine

Posted by | Cyrena Rose

Halle Berry, still fab at 46!  The Cloud Atlas star covers Times Style Magazine . . .

The Oscar winning-actress chats with the magazine about her daughter Nahla, being bi-racial, breaking her foot during the first week of filming CA, beauty and self-esteem, her upbringing and more!

Check out photos of Berry’s shoot and excerpts of what she told the mag below:

Berry’s looks are no doubt a great gift.  Even now, more than halfway through her 40s, she retains perfect skin, a long, elegant neck and a body that is both slim and womanly. (She says a diagnosis of Type-1 diabetes, at age 19, made healthy eating and exercise a necessity.) But, she says, “just because they see my face doesn’t mean they see me.  A person’s self-esteem has nothing to do with how she looksIf it’s true that I’m beautiful,” she adds, “I’m proof of that. Self-esteem comes from who you have in your life. How you were raised. What you struggled with as a child.”

When she was 16, her mother stood with her in front of a mirror and asked what she saw. “My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me,” Berry says. “Bloodlines didn’t matter as much as how I would be perceived” — as beautiful but also as a black woman in a world in which the images of beautiful, successful black women were notably absent.

…She hasn’t met him (President Obama), but she attended the inauguration and feels a connection to another dark-skinned child of an absent black father, raised by a white mother. “Being biracial is sort of like being in a secret society,” she says. “Most people I know of that mix have a real ability to be in a room with anyone, black or white.”

I come from humble beginnings,” she says. “I always felt like the underdog. Behind the eight ball.  I learned not to be too high on the hog. Even that night I won the Oscar, I had a fundamental knowing, it was just a moment in time.  Driving home that night, back to my house, I felt like Cinderella.  I said, ‘When this night is over, I’m going back to who I was.’  And I did.”

Photographs by CEDRIC BUCHET. Styled by BILL MULLEN