BEIJING, May 24 -- Hollywood beauty Halle Berry has described her movie flop Catwoman as one of her career "highlights".

The star is at the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of her new X Men film, with co-stars Sir Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, and director Brett Ratner.

Catwoman, one of the actress's most recent films, was trashed by critics and earned the Oscar-winner a Razzie, Hollywood's prize for the worst performances.

But today the star, 39, said: "I had a wonderful experience on Catwoman, a wonderful experience.

"As an actor hopefully your career is long. Sometimes you birth babies, that's how every film feels like when you present it to the world.

"Some perform well, some don't. The audience has a right to reject certain things.

"But it doesn't mean the experience was anything less meaningful for me than anything else I've ever done.

"In fact it was one of the highlights because I pushed myself and grew as an artist in ways that never will be realised by anybody but me. To me it was well worth it," she added.

Berry said she refused to be a victim of the so-called Oscar Curse, "that once someone is lucky enough to have won the award, they often allow the pressure of the industry and of other people to come sit down on their shoulders".

She added: "That pressure says that now you've won this award you're somebody special, somehow different than you were before.

"I never wanted that to happen, I didn't receive that award by perceiving myself as someone special or different.

"What I want to do, what I've wanted to do, is continue approaching my career as an artist who is lucky to be working, a woman of colour trying to make her way out of nowhere, someone who reserves the right to take chances and risks".

Berry added: "I never once got into this business to be on the cover of a magazine.

"Those people that really dream to be famous and dream to be on magazines have no idea how hard the work is and what the craft is all about.

"The celebrity that comes with it is just something that you have to learn to deal with."

The star said she was attracted to the story of the mutants in the third and final X Men film, X-Men: The Last Stand, on a personal level.

"I'm emotionally connected to this project because being a woman of colour the thought of my Government enforcing an antidote that would make me wake up one day and make me void of the thing that has made me who I am is horrifying."

Sir Ian McKellen added that he felt drawn to the X Men films, featuring a group of mutant outsiders, as a "gay man who some people think ought to be cured".

He added that his "handicap" as a youth was "poverty" and that he had felt while growing up "like a second class citizen".

(Source: CRIENGLISH. com)