With the Golden Globe Awards just around the corner (Jan. 16), we would like to spotlight some nominees for this year.

Halle Berry
The 44-year-old single mom, who is the first African-American actress to win an Academy Award for her riveting role in “Monster Ball,” is up for nomination for best actress at the Golden Globe for her portrayal of a schizophrenic ago-go dancer-stripper who has two other personalities who live within her psyche in “Frankie & Alice.”

When we talked to Halle in West Hollywood, she explained how challenging it was to do three personalities for the role. “The biggest challenge in this movie besides just creating three completely different characters was to find a way to do them as seamlessly as I could all at one time.

When I first had a conversation with our director, Geoffrey Sax, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘Now, are you going to be able to perform these characters without me ever cutting the camera.’ I said, ‘Yeah sure, absolutely’ never really knowing if I could actually do that. But I knew that that was important from his filmmaking point of view that we do this in a way that was unadorned and in a way that was organic and real with no camera trickery.

“So that is what I focused on being able to seamlessly go in and out of these characters. A lot of my own personal rehearsal was going in and out of them all the time as I just walked around the house. I tried to be sure that I knew them all well enough that I could put them on at any moment. That’s a different experience than I’ve had as an actor.”

Nicole Kidman
The 43-year-old Australian actress just read a review of the Broadway play, “Rabbit Hole,” and was convinced she wanted to produce it and make a movie of it.

The movie is about Becca (Nicole) and Howie Corbett (Aaron Eckhart) whose happy married life is suddenly shattered when they lose their young son in a car accident.

Nicole, who won an Academy Award for her Virginia Woolf role in “The Hours,” revealed, “Because of what the film is all about and because of where I am in my life right now, I was able to access the emotions and the intensity of the role very quickly. But then, I was not able to let it go very quickly. When I would go home and go to sleep, a number of times during the filming, I woke up absolutely just sobbing where you wake up out of a dream or a nightmare. I was shaken to the bone and I have had that happen in my life over 43 years but I have never had it happen in such a succession, 3 or 4 times over a period of 6 weeks. That’s when I went, this is disturbing my subconscious in a way that I wasn’t even aware of.”

Colin Firth
The 50-year-old English film, TV and stage actor, who portrayed the stuttering King George VI in the historical drama, “The King’s Speech,” directed by Tom Hooper, is amazingly cool and collected when we interviewed him at the Toronto Film Festival.

Asked what he thought of the movie which is being described as a thinking man’s romance because of the special bond between the king and his speech therapist Logue (Golden Globe nominee Geoffrey Rush), Colin replied, “Romance is the word we used. I do not think Logue and King George VI would have seen it that way necessarily because the issues that it is addressing are extremely serious. A person with an impediment to his communication finds himself in a kind of abyss. One of the things that define us as humans is language. There is no other species that is able to communicate in the way we do. The fact that this man is royalty accentuates the problem. It is interesting that this takes place between two older men and not two high school kids.”

James Franco
The award-winning 32-year-old American actor-director-producer-screenwriter was critically acclaimed for his portrayal of Aron Ralston, the American mountaineer who cut off his arm to free himself from a boulder in Danny Boyle’s biographical adventure, “127 Hours.”

In an interview in Toronto, the multi-talented James told us about his meeting with Aron, “Aron is a gentleman and he’s a very positive guy. He is a very inquisitive guy and he is a writer too. He’s your competitor. He is doing an article for some magazine about his experience of his life being made into a movie. He’s the kind of guy that if you ask him a question, he’ll want to give you, I guess maybe like me but in a different way, a very, very long answer.”

Formerly a Manila journalist, Los Angeles-based Janet Susan R. Nepales is a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.