Part of Musicians Who Act featuring Lady Gaga, Will Smith, Ice Cube, Justin Timberlake, and Frank Sinatra.
Rise to Fame
The name 'Latifah' came from an Arabic book she found at age 8. It means 'delicate' and 'very kind.' The persona that followed was neither. She was 19 when All Hail the Queen dropped in 1989, and 'Ladies First,' a collab with Monie Love, was the first track by two female rappers who weren't already in a group. By 1993, Black Reign went gold, the first solo female rap album to reach that milestone, and 'U.N.I.T.Y.' won the Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance. Spike Lee's casting director spotted her at a summer concert and put her in Jungle Fever. By 2002, Chicago had earned her an Oscar nomination. Acting wasn't a side hustle.
In the Spotlight
Five seasons of The Equalizer on CBS, wrapped in 2025, is the kind of run that most crossover rappers would retire on. She didn't. Flavor Unit Entertainment, the production company she launched in 1995 with Shakim Compere, has a first-look deal with Audible and keeps adding projects. In 2023, her debut album All Hail the Queen entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, the first female rap recording in the collection. She hosted the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors one year after accepting one herself. Now she's developing a biopic of her own life, produced with Will Smith's Westbrook Studios. She's not waiting to be remembered. She's deciding how.
Side Notes
At the 2021 BET Awards, she acknowledged her partner Eboni Nichols and their son Rebel publicly, closing a chapter the press had spent years trying to write for her. She's also a vice-president of BlueSugar Corporation, which broke ground on a $14 million affordable housing development in Newark with 76 units and ground-floor space reserved for nonprofits. A 2020 episode of Finding Your Roots traced her lineage to October 1, 1792, the exact day an ancestor named Juggy Owens was emancipated. That kind of specificity has a way of putting everything else in perspective.