Academy Award-winning actress, Halle Berry graces the cover of ESSENCE (for the seventh time!) for our annual Hollywood issue. CNN’s “American Morning” correspondent Lola Ogunnaike talks to Berry about her upcoming movie, “Frankie and Alice,” remaining a successful Black actress in Hollywood and playing her most important role-being a mom to her 9-month-old daughter, Nahla.

The Hollywood special also includes a photo spread featuring the legendary Diahann Carroll, Oscar nominee Taraji P. Henson and “The Secret Lives of Bees” director Gina Prince-Bythewood. Each of the ladies will be honored at the second annual ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon taking place February 19 during Oscar Week at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The March 2009 issue hit newsstands on February 12.
On dating a White man:
“I tried Black men. I tried,” she wails in a mock southern accent. “I married two Black men. You know I tried.” She laughs again before making clear that “I don’t hold all Black males responsible because of the two bad eggs I got. I even dated Black men after my last divorce, but this is just where I found love.”

On her longevity in Hollywood:
“Setbacks energize me. They make me realize that I have more work to do.”

On being a mom:
“I thought I knew love before, but I never knew anything like this.”

On going bald for a role:
“I am shaving it off,” she says. “I know. Here comes the controversy, but I have to do it for the role and it will grow back – I hope.”

Video from behind the photoshoot.

Gallery updates from today.

Halle Berry is one busy woman, but there’s at least one thing she doesn’t have to worry about these days: changing 11-month-old baby Nahla‘s stinky diapers!

“I know it sounds weird, but I really like diaper duty. I don’t mind at all,” the Oscar winner’s hottie boyfriend and baby daddy, Gabriel Aubry, told us yesterday at the Callaway Golf Foundation’s tournament benefiting the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s cancer research programs.

In fact, Aubry says he’s become quite the expert.

“I’m amazing at changing diapers,” he bragged. ”So skilled it’s not even funny. Lights up, lights down, it doesn’t matter.”

Aubry also tells us Nahla has started talking. “Sometimes she repeats a word right after you,” Aubry said. “Like the other day, I said, ‘Peekaboo,’ and a moment later, she said, ‘Peekaboo.’ It was so cute.”

The couple definitely want to make more babies. “Nahla’s so great that I’d have 10 more of her,” Aubry said. “But I’ll stop at two.”

And while it sounds like family life couldn’t be more perfect for them, Aubry does have one complaint.

“Just being with the family is great, but I wish we had more—how can I say this—privacy,” Aubry explained. “I mean, there are 30 people who live outside our house.”

She may be their only child for now, but Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry’s daughter, Nahla Ariela, will be getting a brother or sister – if the proud papa gets his way.

“She needs a sibling,” Aubry told PEOPLE at Monday’s Callaway Golf Foundation Challenge at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif., to benefit the Entertainment Industry Foundation. “I think it’s important.”

“I’ve never known anybody who’s had a single child [and] I’ve always been around big families,” adds Aubry, who comes from a family of eight children. “I believe in big families.”

And what does Berry, 42, think of his plans to expand the family?

“She’s okay with it,” he says. “Absolutely.”

As for baby Nahla, who turns 1 in March, Aubry says the toddler is walking and talking, and even practicing a second language.

“I don’t want to say [what her first words were] but it was probably ‘dada,’ ” he says. “She doesn’t say ‘dad.’ She says ‘papa,’ which is the French version of it.”

But to not hurt anyone’s feelings, says Aubry, “Let’s just say she said, ‘mama.’ “

The site is slowly coming along and it wont be long before the site is more or less complete. It’s time for me to keep you a little updated on the gallery. I’ve added some recent candids:

The gallery has also been added with tons of Movie Stills, Appereances, old Candids, Press Conferences & Photocalls.

New In Town was an old idea for screenwriter Kenneth Rance. But Renee Zellweger was the “new” part. He admits he’d had Halle Berry in mind for the role since an encounter in a Minneapolis bar 16 years earlier.

“I was born and raised in Minneapolis, and after college I was at a nightclub and saw this very attractive woman dancing like there was no tomorrow. I bought her a drink and said, ‘Where you from?’”

The African-American woman turned out to be a young business exec from North Carolina, living in the real-life town of New Ulm. “She said, ‘There was an opportunity to be promoted at work, and it involved this kind of suicide assignment, not realizing I was going to be the only black woman in this town of 13,500.’

“The loneliness of being in that town, I thought, that’s a movie!”

Co-writer C. Jay Cox (Sweet Home Alabama), who inherited the script, said, “It was a fish-out-of-water story, but so little of what made the script work was about race, about this woman being in the whitest town in America. Very little of it had to be changed, from the idea was that it was written with Halle Berry in mind, I was surprised at how little of it needed to be changed for Renee.

“It was a story about people and our assumptions of city versus small town, and how they function in our lives.”

The subplot about parent corporations cutting back on the livelihoods of people far away also became more relevant with the recent economic meltdown. “It’s interesting,” says Cox, “We’re going through a real crisis. Without getting too heavy in a romantic comedy, real people are struggling for a living, and closing down plants. It is not about numbers and bottom lines. These things affect real people in real ways.”

Halle Berry allegedly got her dress trapped in an escalator and caused a mass panic earlier this week.

The actress was making her way to the Western Ball to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday when her outfit got caught, reportedly prompting her to start “frantically screaming”.

“Halle was on her way to the ball, but she was looking lost and confused in the crowd of people,” a source told Page Six.

“She stepped on to the escalator and the long train of her dress got caught, causing a scene of panic. She began frantically screaming and security had to hit the emergency brake.”

The 42-year-old X-Men star eventually managed to release her dress and make her way to the celebrations.

Halle Berry was recently spotted at Sabrina Sky in Scottsdale, Arizona, shopping for her baby Nahla.

Sabrina Sky is an edgy children’s clothing and accessories store with lines such as Juicy Couture Baby, Ed Hardy, True Religion, Joes Jeans and Harajuku Lovers. The store is truly one-of-a kind – there’s a life-sized dollhouse in there!

So what did Halle Berry buy, you ask? A Stripe Plum Tunic by SpenldidLeather, a Diaper Bag by Christine Price, and a onezie by Childish Pegasus

The store was created by Angela Clervoix (wife of record producer Sha Money XL), and named for her daughter, whom she sadly lost to SIDS in 2005.

For more information, or to shop, visit the Sabrina Sky website!

Source.

We’re working really hard on the gallery, as I’ve stated earlier then there is a lot to be added and there has already been added loads of new pictures to the gallery. So just to keep you updated on the process then I thought I would post a list of the newly added pictures so far. (Click to view the list)

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