Queen Latifah

Dana Elaine Owens (her real name) was born in East Orange (New Jersey), on March 18, 1970, into a humble family of police officers, as both her father and her older brother were law enforcement officers. . During her childhood and youth, she surrounded herself with marginal youth from the streets, inclined rather to the other side of the law. The adventures of her friends awakened her vocation to sing the street hardships of African-Americans, through rap songs. And although she had to go to work in a ‘burger’ to survive, she was soon signed as a rapper, in 1989, by a major record label that made her change her name. She chose Queen Latifah, which in Arabic means sensitive and delicate. She debuted with the album All Hall the Queen,a milestone of the genre, which was traditionally taken over by men. Praised by rap connoisseurs for its hints of jazz, soulful reggae and other styles, the record shaped the image and performance that later female rappers have followed.

The executives of a television network noticed the passionate personality of the artist, so they decided to recruit her for a daily talk show whose name left no doubt, Queen Latifah , and in which she proposed commitment to others, to solve everyday problems. There she made it clear that she was a talented girl, for which she was recruited for the cinema by Spike Lee , the guru of African-American cinema, who gave her a role in Wild Fever , one of her greatest successes. She played her first leading role on the series Living Single , which started on a local network, eventually airing nationally. In cinema, her success would resist her, since the thriller Until the end, the science fiction film Sphere , and the romantic comedy From Now On , with Holly Hunter and Danny DeVito , passed without regret or glory. The haunting thriller The Bone Collector had much more impact , but his role was rather brief.

Far from being discouraged, Queen Latifah continued to try to break into the cinema, and even allowed herself to give advice to other women who were trying to succeed in life. For this she wrote Ladies First: Revelations of a Strong Woman , a self-help book that she swept American bookstores. Her recommendations should not be misguided, because they worked for her herself. Through tenacity, she landed the role of a lifetime for her, Matron Morton, a sharp-witted wren of the prison who helped two very distinguished inmates, Roxie Hart (Rene Zellweger) and Velma Kelly ( Catherine Zeta-Jones ).), both accused of murder. Queen Latifah’s musical number is one of the best in the film, and her performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She could only snatch the statuette from her another interpreter of the same film, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had a more prominent role.

From that moment on, the actress tries not to rest on her laurels, ignoring that “bring up a good reputation and go to sleep”, and to avoid falling into oblivion, she does not stop. She moves like a fish in water in comedies like Ella rode la gorda , in which she also served as executive producer, and she shared the bill with Steve Martin , a true specialist in the genre. Taxi, total skid , American adaptation of Taxi , one of the biggest successes as producer of the Frenchman Luc Besson , combined humor with a lot of action. Latifah inherited a character that in the original was a man, giving it a feminine touch that did not exist in Besson’s film. “I like movies that require a lot of physical work, andTaxi gave me the opportunity to drive and do risky scenes, which is why I agreed to star in it”, explains the actress. For the immediate future, she is preparing feature films that she is going to cut to her measure, by launching them from her production company, such as Cookout , a comedy. We will also see her in Bad Girls , an action movie in which she will co-star with Jada Pinkett Smith .