In a new interview in Parade Magazine, Halle Berry speaks candidly about considering suicide after her difficult failed first marriage to baseball player David Justice. She said she sat in her car with the gas on and was thinking about letting the carbon monoxide kill her, but realized that she didn’t want her mother to find her that way and thought it would be selfish to go through with it.

“I was sitting in my car, and I knew the gas was coming, when I had an image of my mother finding me,” she says.

“She sacrificed so much for her children, and to end my life would be an incredibly selfish thing to do. It was all about a relationship. My sense of worth was so low,” Berry said.

“I promised myself I would never be a coward again.”

Berry describes her second marriage, to singer
Eric Benet, as “really horrific.” “We were in sex rehab after one year. I wish I had left then, but I was putting everyone’s needs before mine,” she says.

Berry goes on to say that she now has the goal of motherhood in mind and that it’s a “different chapter” in her life. She has said in the past that if it doesn’t happen for her naturally she will adopt a child.

That’s really brave of her to talk about considering suicide. When you hear about celebrities facing severe depression it’s kind of reassuring to know that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone has hard times in life that we get through somehow.

Berry is appearing in the upcoming thriller Perfect Stranger with Bruce Willis.

Update: Thanks to ONTD for this excerpt from a December, 2002 Vogue interview with Halle, in which she went into more detail about her suicide attempt:

“The day in 1997 their divorce was final, Halle tried to commit suicide. “I didn’t slit my wrists,” she tells me. “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. 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?”

Here she is at the Perfect Stranger photocall in Madrid on 3/27. I love how she looks annoyed while she’s bending over, like she’s giving the obligatory cleavage shot, but isn’t happy about it. Pictures [via]