After winning a Best Actress Oscar, a horror film may seem an odd choice for her next movie, but Halle Berry is keen to continue with the weighty drama, as well as the more glamorous roles. She tells Steve Pratt about dungeons, brieaking her arm - and leather catsuits.

PERHAPS they get carried away by the glitz and glamour of the occasion. Maybe they're simply overcome by the sense of achievement. Or, then again, they're just thinking of the increased pay cheque an Oscar win can bring.

Whatever the reason, Hollywood actresses get very emotional and often incoherent after stepping up to collect a best actress Oscar, whether it's Sally Field bleating "You really like me", or this year's winner Charlize Theron thanking everyone including her lawyer.

Last year it was Halle Berry's turn to make us cringe. Getting her hands on the best actress Oscar - and the first African American to do so - was followed by a speech both tearful and rambling.

Berry admits watching footage of that speech since then. Twice, in fact. "Mainly the reason I watched was that I was so out of my body that I didn't remember what I'd said," she says.

"I felt I talked far too long, and wish I could have edited it. But I also felt it was a great moment for me in my life, and knew that it was about more than me. So I thought maybe it was okay the way it was."

Oscar moves around her house "depending on my mood". As she explains: "Sometimes he's on the kitchen table, some days he's in the bathroom, some days he's in the living room - he's always near".

Winning the gold-plated statuette cemented Berry's place on the Hollywood A-list as an actress able to move from blockbusters like the Bond movie Die Another Day and X-Men to lower budget dramas such as Monster's Ball, for which she won her Oscar.

Publicity surrounding her win was considerably more positive than that accompanying her two failed marriages and a court appearance, with subsequent fine and community service, arising from leaving the scene of a traffic accident.

On the surface, horror movie Gothika might seem a strange choice for her first movie after winning the award. But the role of a criminal psychologist working in a women's prison who finds herself behind bars, accused of killing her husband, offers a meaty leading role. She's gone on to star as Catwoman. The $100m film isn't a direct spin-off from Batman, she maintains. "I'm my own incarnation, not to be compared to the others," is her view.

She arrives for the interview having hung up her leather catsuit after finishing filming on that movie the night before. As with any comic strip transfer to the cinema, more obsessive fans have expressed worries about the screen version.

"I love the look of the film. It's modern, it's edgy, it's very much reflective of the 21st century and who women are today," says Berry.

"As for the controversy about the look of the film - you can't please everyone. As I get older I've learnt to accept that and take it with a grain of salt. I also remind myself there was a lot of negativity around X-Men, especially on the Internet from comic book aficionados. Nothing we did on that movie made them happy initially and then, by the end of the second movie, they loved it. So we try to stay true to what we were trying to do."

Making Gothika was made all the more realistic by Berry finding some of the scenes creepy. Not actually scary, she says, although shooting scenes in a real prison in Quebec gave it a certain atmosphere.

"We all know it's a movie and that this stuff isn't really happening, but it was a little creepy to be in dark dungeon-type places, spaces where you knew real death had taken place," she says.

'IT was always very cold, and there was just some element in the air that made us all feel like we weren't truly alone where we were shooting. That lent to the spookiness of the film-making."

Her character in the film sees the ghost of a young girl, and Berry herself admits to a paranormal experience of her own while filming her Dorothy Dandridge biopic in 1999. "People who believe in ghosts are the ones who've had that experience," she says.

"Our nature is to be very sceptical. Unless we've seen it, we don't believe it. I did have a couple of experiences on Dorothy Dandridge. Her spirit, or some spirit, was around me all the time. I knew it, so did the crew and everybody around me.

"Nothing outlandish happened. It was just a feeling that we all would get. Strange things would happen that couldn't be explained other than by saying, 'okay, something supernatural has got to be happening here'."

Despite that, she loved filming her first excursion into the horror movie genre. She had been tempted to prepare by watching The Shining and other great horror films or thrillers, but resisted, knowing that Gothika had to stand on its own. She didn't want to mimic or copy things that she'd seen done before.

"I enjoyed the experience. It was really cathartic for me at the end of the day. Most movies usually are," she says.

"I've also grown as an actor as I've got older in life. I've learnt how to go to work, immerse myself 100 per cent in the character and, at the end of the day, take it all off and go back, get a nice bubble bath, have a nice massage and realise that is not my life. And that feels good."

What wasn't so good was breaking her arm during filming. Co-star Robert Downey Jr was supposed to twist her arm, he twisted it the wrong way and it broke. "But we're friends," she laughs. "It was an accident, just one of those freaky accidents while making this odd movie. One of the strange things that happened."

WITH her arm in a plaster cast, shooting had to be halted for eight weeks and then resumed with the actress wearing a smaller cast from her wrist to elbow.

She was also injured during filming Die Another Day and was hit on the head by a light while making Catwoman, but protests that she's not accident prone. "The media has brought it up to something abnormal," she says. "It's not stopped me wanting to do such films. I give 100 per cent and love physical roles".

It doesn't look like the mooted Bond spin-off featuring her character Jinx will happen in the near future, at least not before the next 007 goes before the cameras. "And now there's Catwoman. I don't know how many women I can play," she says.

She can use the power bestowed by her Oscar win to work on her own projects. She already had a production company, which was behind the Dorothy Dandridge biopic. "I think, especially as a woman, I have to create my own experiences, the movies I am most passionate about being part of," she says.

"Initially, the company was for projects for myself, but now for other actors I admire or want to work with. It's where I'm heading in the future. I won't be in front of the camera for the rest of my life, although I don't know if I will direct. I don't necessarily know if that's a talent I embody."

* Gothika (15) opens in cinemas on Friday.

Published: 27/03/2004