<p>After leaving her alcoholic and abusive husband, Judith Ann Hawkins raised her two daughters, including actress Halle Berry, as a <a href="https://esme.com/voices/perspectives/whats-a-solo-mom" target="_blank" class="wordlink">Solo Mom</a>. “She never wanted me to focus on my physical self,” Berry once told <em>People</em> magazine. “My mom always said, ‘Beauty is what you do.’” While pursuing modeling work in Chicago, Berry once asked her mother for money to help pay the bills when her roommate unexpectedly moved out. “Judith gave her daughter a stern lecture,” writes Michael Schuman in his book <em>Halle Berry: A Biography of an Oscar-Winning Actress</em>. “She told her daughter it was time to figure a way out of the mess on her own.” This tough love taught Berry to take care of herself, she told <em>Reader’s Digest</em> in 2007. Berry has appeared in films ranging from <em>X-Men</em> to <em>Monster’s Ball</em>, for which she became the first African-American woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress. Her mother’s influence has buoyed her through ups and downs: in 2005, accepting a Golden Raspberry Award, or “Razzie,” for Worst Actress for her role in <em>Catwoman</em>, Berry said, “When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser, then there’s no way you could be a good winner.”</p><hr><p><span style="font-size: 11px;">Image via Shutterstock.com/Joe Seer</span></p>
<p>When actor Al Pacino was two years old, his parents divorced and his mom, Rose, moved with her son to her parents’ home near the Bronx Zoo. It was a tough childhood in some ways—money was tight, for one thing. But in an interview with <em>The Telegraph</em>, Pacino remembers how his mother would take him to the movies; when they got home, the boy would act out parts from the films they’d seen, including a terrific impression of the alcoholic portrayed by Ray Milland in <em>The Lost Weekend</em>. “It was kind of a strange thing to bring a little kid to, no?” he says. “But it had an effect.” At one point, Pacino’s mother encouraged his interest in the theater. “She even took me to see a couple of Broadway plays,” he remembered in a 1973 interview with <em>The Los Angeles Times</em>. “I truly believe it was because of my mother that I never went the way of my friends—I saw two close friends die from drugs.” Rose and her son did not always agree: when Pacino dropped out of school, he and his mom had an argument, prompting him to leave home. But he still held himself responsible for the family. He moved to Greenwich Village and took low-paying jobs in order to support Rose, whose health was shaky at best. “I kept telling my mother I’d soon be doing something big, that I’d met a person who was going to make me a real draftsman,” he remembered in <em>The Los Angeles Times</em> piece. “I said that because I thought ‘draftsman’ sounded very important.” Pacino was in his early 20s when his mother died of a heart attack. He had just starting to make his way as an actor in tiny Greenwich Village theater productions. Yet even years later, he remembered and missed things about her. He told <em>The Los Angeles Times</em>, “The thing I miss most is that thing of having people look me in the eye in a certain way, the way your mother looks at you, no matter what you’ve done.”</p><hr><p><span style="font-size: 11px;">Photo Credit: Theater Company of Boston [Public domain]</span></p><p><span></span></p>
<p>After separating from her husband, Leona McCauley moved with her son and her daughter, future civil rights activist Rosa Parks, to her parents’ farm in Alabama. McCauley was a teacher and taught her daughter to read at a young age. The segregated schools Parks attended often lacked the most basic school supplies, even desks. In a 1995 interview with the Academy of Achievement, Parks recalled that her mother “did not have the notion that we were supposed to live as we did, under legally enforced racial segregation. She didn’t believe in it.” Parks’s famous refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 spurred the Montgomery boycott and other efforts to end segregation. After her death in 2005, her casket rested in state in the rotunda of the United States Capitol for two days, making her the first woman and second African American to achieve this distinction.</p>