Queen Latifah picked her name at eight and hip-hop firsts followed
Dana Owens was eight when she found the Arabic name Latifah, meaning delicate and very kind, in a book of names. A decade later she was a rapper challenging how Black women were treated, and soon after, the first hip-hop artist with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Raised mostly in East Orange, New Jersey, by a teacher and a police officer, she played power forward on her school basketball team and started out beatboxing for a group called Ladies Fresh. A demo reached Fab 5 Freddy of Yo! MTV Raps, and Tommy Boy signed her. Her debut album, All Hail the Queen, arrived in 1989 when she was 19, and its single Ladies First with Monie Love was the first collaboration between two female rappers who were not in the same group.
Her songs tackled domestic violence, street harassment and bad relationships. Black Reign in 1993 made her the first solo female rapper to earn a gold record, and its single U.N.I.T.Y. won a Grammy while pushing back against violence toward women. She was also the first rapper to perform in a Super Bowl halftime show. Later she moved toward jazz and soul standards, headlining the Hollywood Bowl in 2007 before a crowd of more than 12,400.
Acting ran in parallel. She starred as Khadijah James on the sitcom Living Single from 1993 to 1998, writing and singing its theme, with her real mother cast as her screen mother. Playing Matron Mama Morton in Chicago earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and a role as a woman living with HIV in Life Support brought her first Golden Globe.
Later highlights include winning an Emmy as a producer of Bessie, the HBO film in which she played blues singer Bessie Smith, and five seasons leading a revival of The Equalizer from 2021. She received her Walk of Fame star on 4 January 2006 and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2026.
Source: Queen Latifah
