Halle Berry is well-known as a beauty queen, model, the recipient of the 2002 Oscar for Best Actress – but it is not generally known that she is a Type 1 diabetic.

Brief life history

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Halle Berry was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1968, the youngest of two daughters of Jerome and Judith Berry. She was named after a department store called Halle Brothers. (Her name is pronounced ‘Halley’ – in case you wondered.) Her father was black and her mother white, which, as can be imagined, could cause problems for a child at the time. Her father, whose behaviour Halle calls abusive, left the family when she was four and for all intents and purposes she grew up in a single-parent family. Today she has no contact with him.

She started modelling at a young age and the determined to succeed, she won the Miss Teen All-American pageant in 1985 and the following year was a runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant. She then decided to turn her hand to acting.

Diabetes diagnosis
It was during the taping of the television sitcom called “Living Dolls” in 1989 that Halle went into a diabetic coma. Shortly afterwards she was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. Determined not to let this have any impact on her ambitions, Halle set about learning to control this condition, while continuing her acting career.

Several movies followed, amongst which Jungle Fever, Strictly Business, Losing Isaiah, The Flintstones, Girl 6, The Rich Man’s Wife, Race the Sun, X-Men and Monster’s Ball. It was for her role in this last movie that she was awarded the Oscar for Best Actress.

But how has she coped with her diabetes, in amongst dealing with this meteoric rise to fame?

"What's it like for me"
“Sometimes, in the middle of a work day, it can be a little inconvenient to say: I have to go shoot up (with insulin). Can you excuse me please? I used to think in the beginning :Oh, they’re going to think I’m a prima donna. But I got over that saying: This is life.”

Halle is also an active volunteer for the Juvenile Diabetes Association. In America, the incidence of Type 2 diabetes is on the rise amongst younger and younger people. This is ascribed to a sedentary lifestyle and a high sugar and high fat diet, two things appearing to become more and more prevalent amongst youth not only in America, but also in other countries, like South Africa.

Being a Type 1 diabetic, Halle’s daily routine would entail regular daily blood glucose level tests, and possibly also several insulin injections. She has to be extremely careful with what she eats, and in her case, not just because she is watching her weight, but to keep her blood glucose levels under control.

Favourite foods
Halle admits that her favourite foods are butter pecan ice cream and salt and vinegar potato chips – neither of which she can eat often or in more than a minute quantity without serious health consequences.

The important thing we learn from Halle Berry’s life and her rise to fame is that one should not let other peoples’ preconceived ideas stand in one’s way and that a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes is by no means an insurmountable obstacle. Her diabetes is well-controlled, she is healthy, she has realised her ambitions and she is an inspiration to all other diabetics.

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