Taraji P. Henson once waited tables on a cruise ship to pay for drama school
Before Cookie Lyon made her a household name, Taraji P. Henson was a Washington kid working mornings as a Pentagon secretary and evenings as a singing waitress. She went on to an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe, and the voice on an Academy Award-winning rap song.
Henson was born on September 11, 1970, in Southeast Washington, D.C., to a department-store manager mother and a father who worked as a janitor and metal fabricator. Her given names come from Swahili: Taraji means hope and Penda means love. She began at North Carolina A&T intending to study electrical engineering, then switched to drama at Howard University, funding her studies with a day job at the Pentagon and night shifts on the Spirit of Washington dinner cruise.
Her breakthrough came slowly. After background work earned her a SAG card, she played Yvette in Baby Boy in 2001. In Hustle & Flow she played Shug and sang on It's Hard out Here for a Pimp, which won the 2006 Oscar for Best Original Song and made Three 6 Mafia the first African-American hip hop act to take that prize. Playing Queenie, the adoptive mother in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Television transformed her profile. She spent two and a half years as Joss Carter on Person of Interest, then from 2015 starred as Cookie Lyon in Fox's hip hop drama Empire. In January 2016 she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a television drama, only the third African-American actress to do so after Gail Fisher and Regina Taylor. That same year she played mathematician Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures, and in 2023 she took the role of Shug Avery in The Color Purple.
Away from the camera, Henson published a bestselling memoir, Around the Way Girl, in 2016 and set up a foundation named after her father that concentrates on mental health. Time listed her among its 100 most influential people in 2016 and 2024, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame gave her a star in 2019. In 2026 she made her Broadway debut as Bertha Holly in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, directed by Debbie Allen.
Source: Taraji P. Henson
