CHICAGO - Actress Halle Berry says she and her Canadian boyfriend tried and tried and tried to get pregnant.
"So there was a lot of staying home and doing what you do. Like, all the time, around the clock," the 41-year-old Academy Award-winning actress told "" on Tuesday.
One negative pregnancy test followed another, "and, finally, after about 35 tests, we finally got a positive test," Berry told Winfrey in one of her first interviews since she announced she was expecting her first child with Montreal-born model Gabriel Aubry, her boyfriend of two years.
Berry, who is about three months pregnant, told Winfrey she does not want to know if it is a boy or a girl.
"There's so few genuine surprises in life anymore that, why not have a huge surprise?" she said. "And I like fantasizing one day it's a girl, one day it's a boy."
Berry says she has been warned that the child may not be all that cute the day it is born.
"When you're pregnant, you have this idealized view of what the baby looks like - it's really like six months old, that's what you see," she said. "You don't really visualize its head smashed, purple, one ear folded down, eyes swollen."
Berry said playing a mother in her latest movie, "Things We Lost in the Fire," helped convince her motherhood was for her.
"I think it validated that I was meant to be a mother because every day I dealt with the character as a mother and thinking as a mother," said Berry, who co-stars with Benicio Del Toro. "It let me know that I must be a mother."
She said she and Aubry do not plan to marry, but feel fully committed to each other.
"I feel more married, in a way, than I ever have in two marriages before," she said. "He really understands the spiritual connection is so much more important than the paper and the pomp and circumstance and the ceremony."
But she says there is something she and Aubry are sure to do: have another child.
"There's just one right now," she said. "But we're hoping, right after this one, to do it again."
