Rise to Fame
At 14, she was dealing crack out of a first-floor window in Baltimore. By 19, she had a recurring role on A Different World and a Hollywood career taking shape. The Baltimore School for the Arts is where it started: Tupac Shakur was a classmate, and when the Hughes Brothers fired him from Menace II Society (1993), he pushed her to stay in the film rather than quit out of loyalty. Set It Off (1996) was where she actually arrived, playing Cleo with a raw intensity that made everything else in her early resume look like warmup.
In the Spotlight
The 2023 memoir Worthy did what tabloids spent years trying to do: it finally explained the marriage. She and Will had been separated since 2016, she wrote, meaning the 2022 Oscars slap happened while they weren't even technically together. Will got a 10-year Academy ban. She got a news cycle that wouldn't quit. Red Table Talk, her Daytime Emmy-winning show, was cancelled by Facebook Watch the same year the book dropped. The alopecia is showing signs of regrowth. The marriage, technically, is still on.
Side Notes
At the Baltimore School for the Arts, she and Tupac were classmates going in opposite directions. She has said she was 'coming out of the life' just as he was going deeper into it. His 1995 marriage proposal, written from Rikers Island according to her memoir, got turned down. That same woman also fronted a heavy metal band called Wicked Wisdom and co-owns the Philadelphia 76ers. The range makes more sense once you know where she started.