Queen Latifah and Halle Berry were honored at Variety’s Power of Women Event on Saturday night. Berry, who showed up with handsome fiancée Olivier Martinez, dazzled in a form-fitting little black dress by Roland Mouret and a pair of matching pumps. The actress was honored for her work with the Jenesse Center, a domestic violence awareness organization.
At the event Berry, who is a domestic violence survivor, recalled a conversation she had with the president of the organization.
“I know I have to be here right now because I’ve been arrested…but I will never leave this place. I will take this very embarrassing negative in my life and I will turn it into a positive,” she said. “Because I know that’s why this happened to me…what I realized is that it was God’s way, it was the universe’s way of telling me, ‘You’re not doing enough.’”
Queen Latifah was also honored for the Lancelot H. Owens Scholarship Foundation, an organization she founded in memory of her brother. She also received another victory when a judge threw out a suit to stop the airing of the “Steel Magnolias” remake that she produced. She shared her excitement about the movie in an interview with Deadbolt.
Latifah is an accomplished actress in her own right but she had no issue deferring to older actresses and singing the praises of younger ones. “You’re working with veteran actors. I received a great amount of support,” she said of the cast. “But I also tried to give a great amount of support because we had a lot of young actors who are extremely talented and who you should watch in the years to come. I think we’ve got a great cast.”
For the Queen, working with this cast was a positive experience. “It was really about us all bonding together to make sure we got the job done,” she continued. “To make sure we really delivered for you, the viewer, so that you could feel an experience that felt as real as it possibly could. Because this material is great in itself, everyone had to show up and do their best job and get off of their real life and get into this life. I think it was pretty awesome”
