A movie made-for-TV by "family" channel HBO, this quality drama would probably have gone undeservedly unnoticed, were it not for the casting of Halle Berry as the titular star and the subsequent hoopla over her Best Actress Oscar last year.

A life story in the style of What's Love Got to Do With It, Face Of An Angel is that all too rare of finds, a tale of someone who is actually worth knowing about. Dorothy Dandridge was beautiful - check out the IMDB page on her - talented, gutsy....and black. In Forties and Fifties Hollywood she stood very little chance of making it big, but still managed to secure some of the best roles going, peaking with Carmen Jones and an Oscar nomination.

Unfortunately her life then began a downward spiral, through a combination of poor relationships, bad career moves and lifestyle excesses, in which Dorothy seems a fragile wisp of a thing, carried along in a current that's out of her control. There's something so sad about a famous person unlucky in love, almost as if their celebrity should be protected from bad judgements and foolish behaviour. Nowhere is this more evident than in Face Of An Angel.

A woman, who stood up to the racism of American audiences and marched into major directors' offices, couldn't tell a good guy from a schmuck and had a series of relationships with white men that ruined her career, her purse and finally her mind. It would be 47 years before another African-American woman made it onto an Oscar list and it's so wonderfully Hollywood that it should be Halle Berry, the actress who portrays her here.

Berry redeems herself for her own bad decisions (The Flintstones, Swordfish) with a flawless performance - a line not easily conceived by a normally anti-Berry reviewer. HBO may have lumbered the movie with an afternoon special title, but it is not half bad. In fact, it's pretty darn good.

All the supporting actors are great, including Star Trek's very own Data - oh come on, he'll always be known as Data - as Dorothy's long-suffering agent and friend and the writer of the book upon which the teleplay is based. Having said that, it's a little too short to give us the in-depth pauses that would promote it to a higher status and there is a tiny bit of schmaltz, but only in appropriate places.

Men will sit there wondering what all the fuss is about, whilst their girlfriends smile, laugh, cry and sigh.