Halle Berry unlocks memories of abuse

Dressed in old jeans, wearing little make-up and holding a dripping paint brush, Halle Berry was almost unrecognizable as the luminescent Bond girl who became the first black star to win an Oscar for best actress.

Yet, standing in the hallway at a battered woman’s shelter, cracking jokes with wary children, Berry said this was where she belonged — exorcising the ghosts of violent men who haunt the star of Die Another Day and X-Men.

The 43-year-old actress has been a low-key volunteer on the night shift at the Jenesse centre in Los Angeles for years but has only now chosen to reveal this part of her life, discussing for the first time how her father beat her mother and how she escaped her own abusive relationships.

She hopes the publicity will help the six shelters run by Jenesse overcome the financial stresses of the economic downturn. In the past Berry has refused to talk about the beatings meted out to her mother by her father, Jerome Jesse Berry, who left her family in Cleveland, Ohio, when she was four. But she has said a boyfriend Wesley Snipes once hit her so hard she is still largely deaf in her left ear.

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