Oscar winner Halle Berry has been a part of many activistic campaigns in her career. The Catwoman star had been a vocal supporter of Barrack Obama during his presidential campaign in 2008 and successfully campaigned against the building of a natural gas facility off the coast of Malibu.
The actress has also been actively involved in a campaign to change the narrative on women going through menopause. Berry revealed last year that she was in the middle of a transitional period and mentioned how she wanted to change the image of women going through the phase. She recently mentioned how she got the diagnosis as she was first given a herpes scare before she came to know about her menopause.
Halle Berry Was Wrongly Tested Positive For Herpes After Meeting Van Hunt
Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry recently attended the A Day of Unreasonable Conversation summit along with Kerry Washington, First Lady Jill Biden, and Paris Hilton among others. Many important conversations around race, political divide, and health were had at the summit, which took place at the Getty Center in LA, California.
Berry, who has long been an advocate for breaking the stigma surrounding women’s health, spoke about her experience with menopause and how she was trying to change the narrative on the phase that every woman faces. She sat along with the First Lady to speak about taboos regarding women’s health and how to portray the struggles faced by older women.
Berry also mentioned that her own experience with being diagnosed with menopause was interesting as she was first told that she had herpes. Talking about the time when she was first diagnosed, she said that she had just met the ‘man of her dreams’, her partner Van Hunt, and after they became intimate, she had extreme pain and decided to get herself tested.
Halle Berry mentioned that her doctor said to her that she had the worst case of herpes. However, when they got tested, both her and Van Hunt ended up not having the disease. She said at the summit (via The Hollywood Reporter),
“First of all, my ego told me that I was going to skip it — I’m very safe, I’m healthy…I realized after the fact that is a symptom of perimenopause…My doctor had no knowledge and didn’t prepare me, that’s when I knew, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to use my platform, I have to use all of who I am and I have to start making a change, and a difference for other women.’”
The Jungle Fever star stressed the importance of being more aware of the conversations surrounding women’s health and mentioned how it was important to break several stigmas associated with the topic.
Halle Berry Has Been A Strong Advocate For Women’s Health
Be it superheroes who can control the weather or real-life characters who have come out strong through their hardships, Halle Berry has played many powerful characters in her filmography. While her roles in X-Men, Monster’s Ball, and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum have given her a badass persona, her off-screen activism is also as powerful.
Berry became a serious advocate of women’s health and conversations surrounding the topic. In 2023, she revealed that she was in a transitional period and the middle of menopause. The actress said that at 56 years old, she felt like she was at the best phase of her life. She said to Women’s Health,
“The most important thing about owning your sexuality as a woman is accepting the station you’re at—and embracing that. And I say that because I’m smack dab in the middle of menopause. And I am challenging everything I thought I knew about menopause. Things like: ‘Your life is over.’ ‘You are disposable.’ ‘Society no longer has a place for you.’ ‘You should retire.’ ‘You should pack it up.’”
In the recent panel with First Lady Jill Biden, Halle Berry spoke about how both men and women should change the way they perceive the phase of women’s lives and own it rather than give it the stature of a ‘dirty word’. She also urged creators and executives to help tell more such stories to break the stigma (via THR). She said,
“[My] aim is about changing the way women and men feel about women during their midlife and how they feel about this — which used to be a dirty little word — menopause, perimenopause, and we in this room have to change that…help us change the way culture views women at this stage of our lives”
The Oscar winner had mentioned to Women’s Health that she was not going to back down even if no one else agreed. She said that she would own her ideas and values and speak up about them.
