Well, she'll probably stop talking about it now...
http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/hotgossip/4-02-07Is it a case of near-death warmed over for Halle Berry? In the current issue of Parade magazine, she admits how close she came to killing herself after her bitter divorce from baseballer David Justice in 1996.
"I was sitting in my car, and I knew the gas was coming when I had an image of my mother finding me," the Oscar winner, 40, tells the celebrity-friendly Sunday supplement. "She sacrificed so much for her children, and to end my life would be an incredibly selfish thing to do."
If you experienced a sense of déjà vu over Halle's so-called revelation, you're not alone. We did a little digging, and it turns out that she's already opened up -- a lot -- about this no doubt very real and very painful episode, usually when she has a new project to promote (by the by, "Perfect Stranger" hits theaters April 13). Although we applaud the actress for bravely speaking out about her personal demons, we can't help but wonder if it's time for her to get some new material, and not just because a few of the story's details appear to have changed through the years. After all, Halle's life, filled as it is with beauty, fame, fortune, an Academy Award and a strapping model beau in Gabriel Aubry, seems to be in a far better place than when she first revealed the suicide attempt a decade ago.
"I took my dogs, and I went in the garage and sat in the car," she confessed to Ebony in March 1997. "For two or three hours, I just cried and I cried. I thought, 'I can't face it.' I think that's the weakest I have ever been in my life. That's what the breakup of my marriage did to me. It took away my self-esteem. It beat me down to the lowest of lows -- the gum on the bottom of David's shoe, that's what I felt like."
According to the mag, "something stopped her from turning on the car" -- a "strength at the very core of her being" she was unaware she had.
"Somewhere in my heart, I think I knew I didn't really want to end my life," said Halle. "I just wanted to end the pain."
A few months later, Berry repeated the story during an emotional tête-à-tête with Oprah, then again in 1999 while stumping for "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," a role that earned her an Emmy.
"You get to a point where you're so down on yourself. I was right there, wondering what I had left," she told Newsweek. "You can kill yourself slowly, and I think that's what Dorothy did."
By 2000, the story had changed slightly from the original Ebony account. Now, the car was apparently turned on and pumping deadly carbon monoxide into the air.
"I sat there for a while and I could smell the fumes. And I started to think how selfish I was being. I hadn't thought about my mother one bit in this whole trauma," she recounted to In Style. "It was a struggle for I don't know how long."
The details were again tweaked in 2002, the year she won her Oscar for "Monster's Ball" and crisscrossed the globe feverishly promoting her bikini-clad Bond girl role in "Die Another Day."
Where she had once sat sobbing in the car for "two or three hours," it now seemed she was in there for only 30 minutes.
"I didn't slit my wrists. I went into the garage and took my two dogs with me. I would never shoot my brains out. I thought, I'll just lie down and go to sleep. I'll sit in the car and I'll asphyxiate myself," Berry told Vogue. "I had a bottle of wine. Car on, garage door shut. I was just going to ... as I cried my eyes out ... not wake up. Somewhere in that half-hour, the only thing that stopped me ... because I was really ready to go, I was ready ... is that I thought about my mother. All I ever wanted to do was to be the good girl, and how disappointing would this be? How much would this kill her and hurt her?"
Halle also credited her mother for pulling her back from the brink in separate sit-downs she did that same year with Larry King and Barbara Walters.
"The thought of my mother when I was in that moment in -- sitting in the car. I was going to asphyxiate myself in a garage," she explained to King. "... With all my heart, wanting to end my life, I thought of my mother and I thought, Wow. How unfair. I would break her heart. My heart's broken and I'm going to kill myself. I would break her heart."
And she told Walters how she felt it wasn't just her beloved Shih Tzus in the vehicle with her.
"As I sat there sort of waiting for it to happen, it's almost like I had a flash of that good angel and the bad angel on the shoulder," she said. "And something was telling me on the right side of my brain, 'Girl, don't do it.' I thought, 'What is my mother going to think if she finds me dead in this car?' I couldn't do that to her. So I got out."
Cut to 2004, when she was out publicizing the massive box office hairball that was "Catwoman." Once again, she was discussing how she had contemplated ending it all, insisting to GQ that she would "never, ever, ever think of doing that again."
Still, right around that same time, she returned to Oprah -- cat-whip in hand -- and confessed to how depressed she became after her marriage to singer Eric Benet imploded the year before.
"I found out there was woman, after woman, after woman, after woman. And then I realized he had a sickness," she said of her ex, before gloomily recalling, "My bay windows looked real good and I thought I was going to go right through them."
