Dana Elaine Owens
March 18, 1970
Queen Latifah
She is an American rapper, actress, and singer. She has received various accolades, including a Grammy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two NAACP Image Awards, and a nomination for an Academy Award. In 2006, she became the first hip-hop artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Latifah has been a resident of Colts Neck, New Jersey; Rumson, New Jersey; and Beverly Hills, California.At age 19, Latifah released her debut album All Hail the Queen (1989), featuring the hit single “Ladies First”. Tommy Boy Records produced her second album, Nature of a Sista’ (1991). Her third album, Black Reign (1993), became the first album by a solo female rapper to receive a gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA),[2] and spawned the single “U.N.I.T.Y.”, which was influential in raising awareness of violence against women and the objectification of Black female sexuality. The track reached the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy Award. Her fourth album Order in the Court (1998), was released with Motown Records. She has since released the albums The Dana Owens Album (2004), Trav’lin’ Light (2007), and Persona (2009).
Latifah starred as Khadijah James on the Fox sitcom Living Single from 1993 to 1998; and landed a leading role in the action film Set It Off (1996). She created the daytime talk show The Queen Latifah Show, which ran from 1999 to 2001, and again from 2013 to 2015, in syndication. Her portrayal of Matron “Mama” Morton in the musical film Chicago (2002), received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has also starred or co-starred in the movie Bringing Down the House (2003), Taxi (2004), Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2005), Beauty Shop (2005), Last Holiday (2006), Hairspray (2007), Joyful Noise (2012), 22 Jump Street (2014), and Girls Trip (2017); and provided voice work in the Ice Age film series.
Latifah received critical acclaim for her portrayal of blues singer Bessie Smith in the HBO film Bessie (2015), which she co-produced, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. From 2016 to 2019, she starred as Carlotta Brown in the musical drama series Star. In 2020, she portrayed Hattie McDaniel in the miniseries Hollywood. Since 2021, she has held the lead role in CBS’s revival of the action drama The Equalizer.
Early life
Dana Elaine Owens was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 18, 1970, and lived primarily in East Orange, New Jersey. She is the daughter of Rita Lamae a teacher at Irvington High School, and Lancelot Amos Owens, a police officer. Her parents divorced when she was ten.
She was raised in the Baptist faith. She attended Catholic school in Newark, New Jersey, and Essex Catholic Girls’ High School in Irvington but graduated from Irvington High School. After high school, she attended classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
She found her stage name, Latifah ( meaning “delicate” and “very kind” in Arabic, in a book of Arabic names when she was eight. Always tall, the 5-foot-10-inch Dana was a power forward on her high school basketball team. She performed the number “Home” from the musical The Wiz in a grammar school play.
Latifah’s older brother, Lancelot Jr., was killed in 1992 in an accident involving a motorcycle that Latifah had purchased for him.[9] A 2006 interview revealed that Latifah still wears the key to the motorcycle around her neck, visible throughout her performance in her sitcom Living Single. In 1995, Latifah was the victim of a carjacking, which also resulted in the shooting of her boyfriend, Sean Moon.
On March 21, 2018, her mother, actress Rita Owens, died due to heart failure, an issue she had been battling since 2004.
In the January 2020 season 6, episode 4 of Finding Your Roots titled “This Land Is My Land”, Latifah learned that her family was descended from a line of freed Negroes, since her ancestors were listed by name in the U.S. pre-civil war census of 1860 in Virginia. Slaves were almost never listed by name in pre-U.S. civil war censuses. Latifah also learned the exact date her ancestors became free which was October 1, 1792, the date her second earliest known ancestor, a woman named ‘Jug’ or Juggy Owens, was emancipated from slavery.
Latifah is a celebrity spokesperson for CoverGirl cosmetics, Curvation women’s underwear, Pizza Hut, and Jenny Craig. She represents her own line of cosmetics for women of color called the CoverGirl Queen Collection. Latifah has also launched a perfume line called “Queen” and “Queen of Hearts”. On May 23, 2018, Latifah was named the godmother of Carnival Cruise Lines’ vessel Carnival Horizon. Apart from singing, Queen Latifah has written a book on confidence and self-respect called Ladies First: Revelations of a Strong Woman.
The Queen Latifah Show was the title of two American television talk shows hosted by Queen Latifah. The original The Queen Latifah Show ran from September 13, 1999, to August 31, 2001. The revamped The Queen Latifah Show debuted on September 16, 2013, and was renewed for a second season in January 2014. On November 21, 2014, due to low ratings, Sony Pictures Television canceled The Queen Latifah Show after two seasons. Production ended on December 18, 2014, and the final episode aired on March 6, 2015, with reruns that continued airing until the end of the television season
Living Single is an American television sitcom created by Yvette Lee Bowser that aired for five seasons on the Fox network, from August 22, 1993, to January 1, 1998. The show centers on the lives of six New York City friends who share personal and professional experiences while living in a Brooklyn brownstone. Living Single is widely regarded as being one of the most influential shows of the ’90s, and is often seen as being the predecessor of the hit show “Friends”
The Equalizer is an American crime drama television series that premiered on CBS on February 7, 2021. It is the second reboot in the franchise, following the 2014 film and its 2018 and 2023 sequels, and is the second series after the 1980s series with the same name.
The series is co-created by executive producers Richard Lindheim, with Michael Sloan, and Queen Latifah, who also stars as the titular character. John Davis, John Fox, Debra Martin Chase, Andrew Marlowe, and Terri Miller also serve as executive producers. Lindheim died from heart failure on January 18, 2021, while working on the series; the series premiere is dedicated to his memory.
In March 2021, the series was renewed for a second season which premiered on October 10, 2021. In May 2022, the series was renewed for its third and fourth seasons. The third season premiered on October 2, 2022.
Often cited as one of the best female rappers, Queen Latifah achieved groundbreaking success in the late 1980s and early 1990s and became what Pitchfork considered as the “most recognizable female rapper” of the golden era of hip hop. AllMusic writer Steve Huey stated that Latifah was “certainly not the first female rapper, but she was the first one to become a bona fide star.” In the book Notable Black American Women, Jessie Carney Smith hailed her as “rap’s first feminist” and “one of the few women to make a mark in the male-dominated field of rap music”. Variety called her “one of the major forerunners for women in modern hip-hop,” and The Guardian referred to her as a “pioneer of female rap”.
Throughout her career, several media publications have referred to her as the “Queen of Rap” including New York magazine (1990) via editor Dinitia Smith, as well as “Queen of Hip Hop”. Latifah became the first solo female rapper to receive an RIAA certification for an album (Black Reign), a commercial breakthrough that the AllMusic editor considered as creating a path for “a talented crew of women rappers to make their own way onto the charts as the 90s progressed”. Her breakthrough also helped place New Jersey on the hip-hop map. In 1998, she performed in the Super Bowl XXXII halftime show, making her the first rapper to do so.
According to an African American Review journal, her Afrocentric feminist music video for “Ladies First” presented a “televisual moment” and disrupted the continuity of sexism and racism that dominated the music videos at the time. The song was listed on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll and was one of the first texts to address the declining standards of male-female relationships in community life. Author Tricia Rose expressed that it “offered hip-hop for the development of pro-female pro-black diasporas political consciousness. In Consequence, Okla Jones noted that the song “U.N.I.T.Y.”—whose lyrics confront slurs against women in hip-hop culture and address other types of disrespect—created a path for future female rappers to be “their authentic selves”.
Queen Latifah became the first female hip-hop recording artist to get nominated for an Oscar. In 2003, Queen Latifah was awarded Artist of the Year by Harvard Foundation. In 2006, Latifah became the first hip-hop artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was also inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2011. In her music career, Queen Latifah has sold nearly 2 million albums in the US. The Root ranked her at number 35 on The Root 100 list. In 2017, American Black Film Festival honored Latifah with the Entertainment Icon Award. In 2018, she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from Rutgers University. In 2019, Harvard University awarded the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal to Queen Latifah for cultural contributions. In 2023, Queen Latifah’s debut album All Hail the Queen, was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, making it the earliest female rap recording to enter the National Recording Registry, and made her the second female hip-hop recording artist to have her music included after Lauryn Hill; however, some outlets incorrectly reported her as the first to accomplish the feat.
She is a recipient of a Grammy Award with six nominations, a Golden Globe Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards with five nominations, two NAACP Image Awards with thirteen nominations, one Primetime Emmy Award with three nominations, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2021, she received the BET Lifetime Achievement Award and was the first rapper female or male to be awarded.