Halle Berry is an American actress, former fashion model and former beauty queen. One of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, she is also a Revlon spokeswoman. Here are 50 interesting facts about this beautiful and talented actress.

Halle was originally named Maria Halle Berry. Her parents, Jerome and Judith Berry, changed her name to Halle Maria Berry when she turned five years old.

She was born on August 14, 1966, in Cleveland, Ohio.

She is named after the grand old Halle Building in Cleveland, Ohio, which originally housed the Halle Brothers department store.

Her father is African - American and her mother is Caucasian.

Halle and her older sister, Heidi, spent the first few years of their childhood living in an inner-city neighborhood.

In the early 1970s, Jerome Berry abandoned his wife and children, after which Judith moved her family to the predominantly white Cleveland suburb of Bedford.

Halle Berry attended a nearly all-white public school, and as a result was subjected to discrimination at an early age. Her early bouts with racism greatly influenced her desire to excel.

She was a cheerleader, a member of the Honor Society, president of her class, school newspaper editor and prom queen.

After graduation, Halle enrolled at the Cuyahoga Community College and studied Broadcast Journalism for awhile until she dropped out.

She worked as a model, and became the first runner-up in the 1985 Miss USA and the first African American Miss World entrant.

In 1989, Halle Berry was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.

For a brief period of time she attended Cleveland 's Cuyahoga Community College, where she studied broadcast journalism. However, Berry abandoned her idea of a career in news reporting before receiving her degree.

She left and moved to Chicago and then New York in order to pursue her modeling career.

Berry's first big-screen break came later that year when she was cast as Samuel L. Jackson's drug-addicted girlfriend in Spike Lee's critically acclaimed film, Jungle Fever.

She began a relationship with Wesley Snipes after meeting him on the set of Jungle Fever. Halle lost 80 percent of her hearing in her hearing after being beaten by ex-boyfriend Wesley Snipes. Christopher Williams had taken the blame for this for many years until he made it clear that Wesley Snipes was responsible for causing Halle to lose her hearing in one ear.

In 1994, she starred as "Sharon Stone" in the live-action version of The Flintstones as a Stone Age seductress.

She married Atlanta Braves outfielder David Justice in 1993, but they later divorced in 1997.

She turned down the role of Annie in Speed which went to Sandra Bullock. (1994).

In 1995, she became the first African American to play the Queen of Sheeba, in the Showtime's movie Solomon & Sheeba.

Playboy magazine named her among the "100 Sexiest Women of the Century" in 1998.

For her role in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge in 1999, the HBO biopic, Halle Berry won a SAG Award, a Golden Globe and an Emmy. Dorothy Dandridge was the first African- American woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and coincidentally Halle Berry is the first to have won in that category.

In February of 2000, Berry was involved in a hit-and-run accident that erupted into a tabloid scandal. After enduring a minor head injury, she claimed that she did not remember leaving the scene. As a result of her actions, she was placed on probation, given community service, and fined $13,500.

In 2001 she starred in Swordfish alongside John Travolta. Although the movie did not do so well, she did receive a $500,000 bonus for showing off her breasts in a topless scene.

She married jazz musician Eric Benét in 2001 but later divorced in 2005. Benét underwent treatment for sex addiction in 2002 while they were married.

She wisely turned down the female lead in box office disaster Gigli (2003), which birthed the relationship of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

As of 2014, Halle remains the only African-American actress to have been awarded an Oscar for a leading role, which she won for her role in the 2002 film Monster's Ball.

She is one of only four actresses, along with Faye Dunaway, Sandra Bullock and Liza Minnelli, to win both the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Razzie Award for Worst Actress (Dunaway shared her award with Bo Derek).

Halle's dress that she wore at the Oscar ceremony in 2002 was voted as the most popular outfit in the first 75 years at Oscars!

In 2002, Halle Berry joined the ranks of the legendary "Bond Girls" as the character Jinx in the hit James Bond spy adventure Die Another Day.

She is the second "Bond girl" to win an Oscar. The first was Kim Basinger.

Halle appeared in the 2004 film Catwoman, for which she received a 'worst actress' Razzie award in 2005 for the superhero protagonist. Showing off her sense of humor, Halle became only the second actor to have ever appeared at the Razzie awards ceremony to accept the award in person!

During a photoshoot for Versace in November 2005, Berry met her next boyfriend, French-Canadian supermodel Gabriel Aubry.

Several months later, Berry confirmed that she and Aubry were expecting their first child together. The couple welcomed a daughter, Nahla Ariela, on March 16, 2008. She and Aubry split in 2010.

Halle Berry wore a traditional Indian sari and pulled it off nicely, amidst playing six roles in her 2012 film Cloud Atlas based on David Mitchell's novel of the same name.

In April 2007, she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Berry is one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, earning as much as $14 million per film.

In 2010, she began dating actor Olivier Martinez after they met while filming Dark Tide in South Africa. The couple got engaged in March 2012.

In April 2013, they announced that they were expecting their first child together. Their son, Maceo Robert Martinez, was born in October that year.

On July 13, 2013, a 46-year-old Berry and 47-year-old Martinez exchanged vows in an intimate ceremony at France's Chateau des Conde. That October, the couple welcomed their first child together, a baby boy.

In August 2013, Berry testified alongside Jennifer Garner before the Assembly Judiciary Committee in support of a bill that would protect celebrities' children from harassment by photographers. The bill passed in September.

She is one of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People."

She does not have a good relationship with her older sister Heidi Berry.

She has starred in six movies with Hugh Jackman: X-Men (2000), Swordfish (2001) X-Men 2(2003), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), Movie 43 (2013), and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014).

She is frequently voted as one of Hollywood's best dressed stars.