ot that any of these roles aren't Oscar-worthy, but here is what Halle Berry has been up to since the movie Monster's Ball made her the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actress.

  She's played the white-maned meteorological marvel Storm in X2 and is in negotiations to portray her in a third X-Men film. She's also been in Vancouver starring in Catwoman, the long-talked-about feature-length film featuring the Batman villainess. She's been in talks to star in Jinx, a spin-off of her character from the James Bond film Die Another Day.

  And she lived in Montreal for a time while she starred in a good old-fashioned horror movie, the supernatural thriller Gothika.

  Berry admits some of the people around her wish she'd go the Masterpiece Theatre route. "They might feel that way," she told the press at the recent San Diego International Comic Convention, "but I've never looked at my career that way.

  "I've never thought 'Well, will it be Oscar-worthy?' As a woman of color, I've tried to find equality by whatever means, and I'm willing to go down that avenue. Oscar has helped, X-Men has helped, Bond has helped. There are no rules in my mind. I'm making my own way."
actors
Halle Berry
Penelope Cruz
Robert Downey Jr.
Charles S. Dutton

director
Mathieu Kassovitz

location
Montreal

outtake
Berry suffered a
broken ulna (the large bone between the wrist and the elbow) in a scene with Robert Downey Jr. "It wasn't like
I was trying to fall from 50 feet and
fell the wrong way or did something crazy. It was just a freak thing," Berry said. The injury did halt production for
several days.


  And her way at the moment is to go large and crowd-pleasing with Gothika. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and produced by Joel Silver (Berry's producer on Swordfish, her breakthrough film with John Travolta), Gothika has Berry alongside Penélope Cruz and Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Miranda Grey, a straitlaced criminal psychiatrist who wakes up in the asylum where she works, accused of brutally murdering her husband.

  Her friends, colleagues and former patients see her increasingly erratic behavior and unending claims of innocence, as the beginning of her descent into madness. The pieces of the mystery fall together to unveil a supernatural influence, one insiders will only call a manipulative, vengeful spirit.

  "My mother was a psych nurse at a VA (Veterans‚ Administration) hospital for 35 years, so the world of psychology is one that I know well," Berry said at the San Diego ComicCon. "I've been around it my whole life, so I felt particularly comfortable with this genre and this script.

  My mom was really helpful in telling me what things a person in that situation would feel and what they might do. And she just helped me get into the mind of someone who is a doctor one day and the next day she's a patient in her own hospital and doesn't know how the hell she got there. She was really instrumental in helping me."

  Berry admits the creepy plot of Gothika had her on edge. "There is a supernatural element and that makes it a classic horror film in some ways. It also has that psychological thriller element. It's not just a slasher movie.

  We were filming in all these dark places (in Montreal), these really gothic places - I'm really spiritual - and I'm sure they had spirits lurking," said Berry. "The house I was staying in got broken into, but there were no signs of breaking and entering - no lock picked, no glass broken. That started me off the first week I was there."

  Call it method acting in a supernatural vein. "This is a great character like I've never, ever played before," she says. "It's a strong character. It's a woman in jeopardy, a woman on the brink. And I love to play those characters."

-Jim Slotek