La carriera di Dana Owens, al secolo Queen Latifah, rappresenta un continuo passaggio osmotico tra canali di comunicazione e forme artistiche diverse e variegate. Queen Latiah, infatti, raggiunge la celebrità nel mondo della musica grazie ad una voce forte e dirompente prestata al mondo del rap. Il cinema e la televisione rappresentano, invece, il secondo passo di una carriera in continua ascesa e transizione, che la vede riscuotere altrettanto successo, cosa non proprio scontata, nel mondo della recitazione, grazie soprattutto alla scelta di ruoli spesso calzanti con le sue potenzialità.
L'esordio nel mondo del cinema arriva grazie al più grande regista afro Spike Lee che la fa debuttare in Jungle fever nel 1991 al fianco di Wesley Snipes, Anthony Quinn e John Turturro. Due anni dopo ha l'occasione di lavorare al fianco Michael Keaton e Nicole Kidman per My life - Questa mia vitadi Bruce Joel Rubin. Nello stesso anno debutta anche sul piccolo schermo partecipando alla sitcom della Fox Living Single, rappresentante quattro donne di colore in carriera tra cui Queen Latifah nei panni della proprietaria/editrice di "Flavor", rivista di moda.

In questi anni comunque non abbandona il mondo della musica al quale è legata fin dall'infanzia grazie alla madre che l'ha avvicinata al jazz e a un professore delle superiori fondatore di un club di jazz e poesia a Newark. La carriera cinematografica va avanti grazie alle apparizioni in Set it offe Kiss, rispettivamente di Gary Gray e Richard LaGravenese per i quali ha la possibilità di lavorare al fianco di Holly Hunter e Danny DeVito, in attesa di un ruolo di spicco che non tarda ad arrivare. Tra il 1998 ed il 1999, infatti, pur non raggiungendo il ruolo di protagonista, partecipa a due importanti produzioni come Sfera e Il collezionista di ossa con Denzel Washington e Angelina Jolie.
Il 2002 rappresenta invece l'anno più impegnato della carriera di questa dirompente attrice tanto sul piccolo quanto sul grande schermo. In ambito televisivo infatti partecipa a Brown Sugar e The Oz rifacimento in chiave hip hop del capolavoro di Victor Fleming per il quale Latifah interpreta Gilda la strega buona. Sul grande schermo invece è l'anno della consacrazione raggiunta grazie al musical Chicago con Reneé Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones e Richard Gere, nel quale Latifh riesce a dimostrare al grande pubblico una spiccata duttilità artistica in grado di farla emergere tanto nel canto, quanto nella recitazione e nel ballo. Interpretazione questa che le varrà la candidatura al Golden Globe e all'Academy Awards nonché una serie lunghissima di proposte per nuovi film.
La fiducia di produttori e adetti ai lavori le consente di riscrivere il proprio personaggio in chiave ironica, abbandonando il bisogno di conferme necessarie per chi entra nel cinema da una porta secondaria come la musica. Partecipa quindi a numerose commedie interpretando egregiamente personaggi sempre più importanti in pellicole come Un ciclone in casacon Steve Martin o Scary movie 3. Un anno più tardi, nel 2004, diventa protagonista assoluta di un film, New York Taxi, continuando a interpretare ruoli dalla carica comica dirompente come anche in Barbershop 2e Beauty Shop.
Nel 2006 recita in due commedie brillanti come Vero come la finzionecon Will Ferrell e L'ultima vacanza, remake dell'omonimo film del 1950 di Henry Cass ritradotto in chiave femminile e che vede Queen Latifah protagonista assoluta con al fianco Gerard Depardieu.
L'anno successivo è sul grande schermo con This Christmas - Un marito nuovo per mamma con Terrence Howard e con Hairspray - Grasso è bello, commedia in classico stile hollywoodiano con John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer e Christopher Walken.

The back seat of a stretch limo making a tight turn is no place to stick a pencil in your eye, but Queen Latifah didn’t flinch. En route to a meeting at Cover Girl, where she is the face — and the name — of its Queen Collection (makeup for women of color), she did a quick touch-up. Peering into the mirror she had pulled down from the car’s ceiling, she stretched her lower lid and, as the car swerved to the left, drew a perfect line inside it. I squinted at the pencil.
“Is that Cover Girl?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said, without moving her eye from the mirror. “As far as you’re concerned.” I laughed as she dropped it quickly into her bag and pulled out a thick orange tube of Lash Blast mascara instead. “This is Cover Girl,” she said.
With or without makeup, Latifah’s face is at the center of her fortune. With her almond-shaped eyes and sweeping cheekbones, she could have been painted by Gauguin, though her beauty is recognizably her own, animated by a warmth, humor and innate self-confidence most women would kill for. Her stardom, in movies and television, has come from her gifts at playing the underdog or the outsider, the thick girl in body only, whose heart and brain are her best defense against the villainously rich, skinny and cutthroat. You can’t help rooting for her.
During the two days I spent with Latifah, I watched people respond to that distinctive face with the inevitable double-takes — on the street, on the train, in the office — with their own yelps of excitement and delight. Hers is a story many of them know well.
Dana Owens of Newark was raised Baptist and named herself Latifah as a child, after learning it was Arabic for “delicate, sensitive and kind.” At 38, she has already had numerous careers. She released her first album, “All Hail the Queen,” at 19, which, with its hit single, “Ladies First,” established her as rap music’s top female artist, proclaiming a message of self-respect and female empowerment in a genre famous for its misogyny. She won a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance in 1994 and was nominated six other times, including for the jazz-vocal “Dana Owens Album,” which went gold. In December she will release a new rap CD produced by Cool and Dre.
Since 1991, when she appeared in a small role in Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” Latifah has made nearly 30 feature films and earned an Oscar nomination for her role as Mama Morton, the prison matron in “Chicago.” On television, she hosted her own talk show for two years and was featured in the Fox series “Living Single.” Last year, for HBO, she starred in the film “Life Support,” for which she won a Golden Globe award and an Emmy nomination. She was also one of its executive producers, as she is for many of her projects. With her mother, Rita Owens, and her childhood friend, Shakim Compere, she founded Flavor Unit Entertainment, a management-and-production company, when she was 20. With Compere’s help, Latifah still manages her own career; Flavor Unit represents the actor Terrence Howard and the rapper Eve, among others.
She returned from a monthlong vacation — Egypt, Mykonos, Barcelona, Ibiza, London — the day after Labor Day, and the following morning we headed to Cover Girl. She had barely 48 hours before leaving for Toronto, where her newest film, “The Secret Life of Bees,” would have its premiere at the city’s film festival. The movie is based on the best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd and also stars Dakota Fanning, Sophie Okonedo, Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson. It opens Oct. 17.
We met on the Acela Express to Baltimore. Traveling with her were Compere and Jarrod Moses, a branding-and-marketing executive who helps manage Queen Latifah’s business with Cover Girl. Compere, along with the William Morris Agency, arranged her participation in Jenny Craig’s Ideal Size campaign, during which she reached her goal of dropping 5 to 10 percent of her body weight — not to preen in a bikini but to lower her cholesterol (she did, by 20 points) and improve her overall health. As Latifah settled into her seat, I worried out loud about submitting a first-class train ticket on my expense report. She held out her arms. “You traveling with the Queen,” she said, laughing. “You had to follow the story.” She took off her Tom Ford sunglasses and put them in her silver quilted Tod’s bag. Then she showed me the gold cartouche she bought in Egypt, with her name in hieroglyphics, on a thick gold chain. “They know how to lounge in the Middle East,” she said. “It’s hot, I get it. They smoke some shisha and lounge. Life is good.”
The Queen (she chose that honorific as a teenager, convinced that all women should feel like queens, even those in humble circumstances) is an expert at chitchat. The ride flew by.

She became obsessed on her vacation with what she called “the muh-JONG game,” meaning mah-jongg, which she discovered on iPod Touch. When Moses and I reminisced about grandmothers who played and agreed that the tiles sounded comforting, like knitting needles, she was genuinely tickled. “They got real tiles?” she said. “I got to get that.”
In Baltimore, we headed to a private dining room at the Capital Grille. Moses talked about plans for a Queen Latifah fragrance and a clothing line. He has been in business with her and Compere for 10 years. “They’re very loyal people,” he told me. “They don’t waver.”
Also at the table was Keith Sheppard, Queen Latifah’s main security guard, whom she has known since they were 12. He is a massive man with a big smile and a warm heart, but when he positions himself between the Queen and an overly eager fan, he can make your blood run cold.
Latifah ordered an Arnold Palmer (half iced tea, half lemonade) and a bowl of New England clam chowder. Moses had preordered some appetizers and salads for the table, and as they were served, Latifah bowed her head, almost imperceptibly, to say a silent grace. She asked for hot sauce for her chowder. She doesn’t like Tabasco, so the waiter brought a dish of something green, filled with seeds, from the kitchen. She tasted it. Her eyes flew open, and she waved her hand in front of her mouth. “That’s exciting,” she panted. “May I have a glass of milk with ice, please?” He hovered as she sipped it. “It made it perfect,” she reassured him.
He looked relieved, but he needn’t have worried. Queen Latifah is no foot-stamping diva. Her manners toward anyone working in service or support — whether an Amtrak conductor, a waiter, a limo driver, a secretary at Cover Girl or an assistant at Flavor Unit — were impeccable. While she seems to have learned how to tune out the well-meaning fans who invariably end up being intrusive (even after she says hello, they won’t go away, which is where Sheppard comes in), to every working person she encountered she was completely present and unfailingly polite.
Compere, who has two children and is still married to his high-school sweetheart — from Irvington High School in Irvington, N.J., where he met Latifah and where her mother was his art teacher — recalled their early days in rap. “A lot of these rappers today don’t know how good they have it,” he said. “We would play Madison Square Garden and then do a rodeo. There were these two brothers in North Carolina, gangsters, who had us playing in a softball field.”
He also recalled another night, at a venue in South Carolina, when the announcer started to introduce Latifah, and the panic backstage rose when no one could find her. “They’re saying, ‘Here she is, the biggest woman in rap,’ ” Compere said, “and where is she? Across the street at McDonald’s.” He shook his head.
Latifah just laughed. “He’s finicky, but I’m full of love,” she said, teasingly. The relationship between the two seems to shift from sister and brother, to star and supplicant, to absent luminary and hard-driving business executive, to wise woman and never-wise-enough man — at least in her opinion. Compere shows an uncommon grace in being assigned each of these roles, and she seems to appreciate that.
As Compere ate a crème brûlée, Latifah told a story from the Egyptian part of her vacation, about someone selling a beauty cream and giving her the worst hand massage ever. Compere listened intently, looking at her with undisguised affection and admiration. It’s the way your real family should look at you but never does.
It was time to drive to Cover Girl, in Hunt Valley, Md. In “Beauty Shop,” the 2005 movie that Flavor Unit produced, Latifah starred as a hairdresser who, fed up with her slick, pretentious boss (hilariously played by Kevin Bacon), quits and opens her own salon. A client offers to send her specially formulated conditioner to the powers-that-be at Cover Girl. Was that Latifah’s product placement?
“Oh, definitely,” she said. “There was no way I was doing a movie called ‘Beauty Shop’ and they were not going to let me get Cover Girl up in there.” She and Compere have already given the company the script of their next film, “Just Right.” If Cover Girl has a stake, they explained, it might assume some of the promotion costs.
As we walked into the building, secretaries clustered in doorways and waved. Four executives from Procter & Gamble representing Cover Girl assembled in a large conference room. Latifah has been a spokeswoman for the company since 2001. She encouraged it to create the Queen Collection in 2005, knowing how difficult it is for women of color to find enough shades of makeup to match their varying skin tones, especially at drug-store, not department-store, prices. Though Cover Girl will not disclose earnings for the Queen Collection, the executives said the line is growing faster than any other ethnic cosmetics brand.
“I’m thinking about darkening under the eyes,” Latifah said. “We should snatch some of those Olay moisturizer ideas for undereye concealer. Heals while it covers. Moisturizes and evens skin tone.” The executives took notes.
“I keep coming back to wipes,” Latifah went on. “Hair products bleed onto the skin, and I’d like a nice refreshing wipe. I don’t know how that business works, but we should investigate and see if it’s viable. It could be packaged in a promotion. Maybe partner it up with the Lash. See if people respond to it.” They kept on scribbling.
Two executives narrated a slide presentation, long on platitudes, about who the Queen Collection consumer is and what she wants. Compere checked his messages under the table and Moses drummed his fingers on top of it. Latifah kept her eyes on the screen, until she interrupted. “You delicately jumped over No. 2,” she said. “How taking care of skin now affects how it looks later in life. Which brings me back to my wipes. That consumer is me.”
She then reeled off a string of suggestions to reach the consumer through promotions and events. She looked at a slide titled Mineral Based Products. “What is that exactly?” she asked.
“The latest trend in mass,” she was told, meaning mass market. She noted the huge sales figures on the screen. “Hey, here’s a happy medium,” she said. “How about our own mineral wipes? With those numbers, I think it’s worth investigating.”
The scene became almost surreal, as if this weren’t life at all but one of Latifah’s own movies, where an Everywoman makes her way into the meeting and is effortlessly smarter than the rest. Think “Working Girl” meets Cinderella, just with Latifah double-cast as her own Fairy Godmother, because as so often happens in her movies, she invents her own rescue again and again. Off screen, her magic comes the old-fashioned way, from persistent, grinding work. “I learned early,” she told me, “that I had to work harder than the white kids and harder than the boys.”
“I have 11 ideas here,” an executive marveled, looking at his list.
Next in the presentation was a promotional shot of the four “real” women chosen to be the faces of the Queen Collection. The executives beamed. Latifah did not.
“Who did the makeup for this?” she asked, scrutinizing the picture. “There are a lot of hot spots, it’s washed out. It’s important to me that those natural girls have that transformation.”
Latifah’s final point was the need to expand the brand overseas. “That’s a good thought,” one executive said, eager to move on. Latifah was not. “I was just in the Middle East,” she said, “and these Saudi women covered up to here are coming over saying, ‘Can I take a picture with you?’ They have on a lot of makeup, don’t be fooled. They beat that face. And in London, I couldn’t walk half a block in Brixton without being recognized. One of the girls was so busy chasing me out of a store, she went right past me. All I’m saying is when I get that kind of attention in two different places like that, how can we brand this Queen Latifah thing? We need to keep building what we have here. There are untapped markets.”
It was hard to argue with that. They assured her they would look into it. Back in the limo, she put up her feet, jubilant. It was a home run, and she knew it. Just then, a car pulled alongside us. “We love you!” a woman called out. Latifah rolled down the window and waved. “Thank you,” she said.
Cut. Print. You could practically see the credits roll. Shot on location in Hunt Valley, Md.
Flavor Unit Entertainment is housed in a renovated firehouse in Jersey City across the street from an abandoned Manischewitz factory. In the stairwell hangs a glamorous blowup of Latifah posed next to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A less glamorous Latifah entered. It was somewhat inevitable that on the second day back from vacation, the star would shine less brightly.
“Hello, all,” she said, a trifle wearily. She wore black jeans, a black T-shirt and black high-top sneakers and carried a Nike jacket with the tag still on it. The only glimmer of vacation was the gold cartouche around her neck.
We walked upstairs to Compere’s office, which was between a screening room and an editing room (they were cutting a reality show about the rapper Ja Rule). On the walls there were blowups of more photos, including one of Latifah with Oprah Winfrey and Jamie Foxx. In it, Latifah is appreciably larger than she is now. She looked up at it. “Jenny Craig really worked,” she said.
Compere sat behind his desk, a flat-screen TV running silently on the opposite wall. He ordered Japanese food — shrimp teriyaki for Latifah — while she plugged in her laptop. The two meet regularly to talk business, both hers and Flavor Unit’s. But her vacations are sacrosanct, so they now faced a month’s worth of tasks. “She’s the ultimate decision maker,” Compere made sure to tell me.
First on the agenda was “Just Right.” “Dana came up with the idea four years ago,” Compere said. “It is the second time we raised the money outside the studio system.” The story centers on two female cousins. “One is a professional gold digger whose mission is to hook up with a basketball player and never work again,” Compere said. “Dana’s character is a physical therapist, who’s a true basketball fan and wants to be a trainer.” Long story short, the gold digger lands the guy, then dumps him when he gets injured and thrown off the team. Latifah’s character restores his health and his game. Then the cousin wants him back. Does he choose her, or the “thicker girl, who’s not a perfect Size 6, ” as Latifah describes her, the one with her own ideals?
Though the film is not yet cast, she can play opposite anyone, it seems. Perhaps the most unlikely pairing was in “Last Holiday,” in which she portrays a timid saleswoman who is given three weeks to live and who decides to blow her money at a luxurious European resort. There she becomes the most popular guest and is befriended even by the temperamental French chef, played by Gérard Depardieu.
“She and Depardieu had instant chemistry,” says Laurence Mark, who produced “Last Holiday.” “It was a hoot. He doesn’t rehearse, he just shows up, and he loved her. She has a natural warmth you gravitate toward. And she is a total pro. It never seems like an effort for her, though she really gets under the skin of the character. There’s nothing in between her and the camera. She opens herself up to it.”
“Just Right” is tentatively scheduled for a 32-day shoot in New York this winter, though it still has no director. One of its producers, Debra Martin Chase, called, and Compere put her on speakerphone. She made small talk while Latifah ate some shrimp.
“So, wassup, Deb?” Latifah called out finally. They discussed a potential director. “He’s kind of a piece of work,” Chase said. “He shows up late with an entourage.” Latifah shook her head. “We don’t need that.”
When they hung up, she didn’t look happy. “I don’t see this happening before January,” she said. “Whoever we get to direct will have their own ideas, we’ll have to rewrite.” She sighed. “I prefer to get it done, knock it out.”
Given all the promotion she’ll have to do until “Bees” opens, along with releasing a new album, can she really shoot a movie too?
“My clone kicks in,” Latifah said glumly.
Talk switched to the album. “Cool and Dre started mixing with their mixer, and I got a bill from their studio I want you to approve,” Compere said. “It’s not that much, but at the end of the day I wasn’t out there.” She nodded. Then he talked about the album cover, which they are hoping Annie Leibovitz will shoot. “What is your vision for it?” he asked her. ‘It’s important to explain it to a photographer.”
She bristled. The previous day’s fizziness gone, she was clearly overwhelmed by the reality of the demands being lowered onto her back. And she was none too thrilled that I was sitting there, pen in hand, bearing witness.
“It’s called Shakim’s Ego,” she said testily.
“Works for me,” he said, without missing a beat.
He changed tack: “I have a surprise for you. Oct. 18 is the BET Hip-Hop Awards in Atlanta. You’re going to perform a new song.” Finally, she smiled. “You like that?” he wheedled. She did, enough to get back on track with the agenda, which had shifted focus to Flavor Unit.
“So many people who work here grew up with us,” Compere told me, “so we give them an opportunity to start their own businesses. Any employee who’s been with us over a decade, if they find something they’re passionate about, we become passive investors and part owners.” The latest business to open was Bayonne Chicken and Waffles, which he and Latifah were to visit on her way to the airport.
She asked some more questions, second-guessed some decisions, consulted her laptop. This meeting clearly could not contain the amount of business they had to conduct. That dialogue never ends.
She and I headed downstairs to the conference room for a one-on-one chat. Compere followed, dogging her to call someone she obviously disliked. “He’s sharp as a basketball, that one,” she snapped.
“Promise me when you’re done you will make this call before leaving the building,” Compere said. She didn’t answer, seating herself in the glass-enclosed room, which afforded no privacy. Sure enough, he came back to ask again, then came back to ask something else, until finally, Ja Rule appeared, and he had to go upstairs. With a cup of something from Starbucks, she settled in.
“I found a lot of my mom in this role, which is not something I ordinarily do,” she said of “The Secret Life of Bees.” She plays August Boatwright, a beekeeper and the eldest of three sisters who run a honey business in South Carolina in the early 1960s. She takes in a motherless 14-year-old and her black caretaker, who have fled their farm town.
“The way August deals with situations, it’s from a confident place,” she went on. “She’s educated, she’s a property owner and a business owner and practically a mother to her sisters. So much of her reminded me of my mother because she was a teacher and also a private person. Our home was always a safe haven for my mom.”
Latifah’s mother, Rita Bray, married Lance Owens, a Vietnam veteran and Newark police officer, in 1965, when she was 16. They had a son, Lance Jr., who was two years older than Dana. When she was 8, her parents separated and later divorced. Rita, living with her children in the projects, went to college, got her degree and became a high-school art teacher.
Rita Owens is still an owner of Flavor Unit. Lance Jr., who Latifah long described as her best and closest friend, became a police officer in East Orange, N.J. Both siblings shared a passion for motorcycles, and Latifah helped buy her brother one for his 24th birthday, in 1992. He was killed riding it. It is a grief she has spoken about often before, saying that for the five years after his death, she was “here but not here.” Yet she made a point of getting back on her motorcycle. She still rides.
“I don’t know if I ever recovered completely,” she said of his death. “I know I don’t hurt as bad as I used to hurt. You can’t replace a person, especially someone with a big presence like my brother. We were best friends, there were no secrets between us. The problem was that a lot of success came after he died, so I resented a lot of things. I felt like all these great things were happening, but I lost the most important thing to me. If that’s the price I had to pay, I didn’t want it. I thought, Take this back and give me my brother.”
She looked out the window, seeming to deliberate over what she said next. “When I was growing up, I would have these dreams that I had to choose between my brother and my mom, that somebody had to die,” she said.
Really?
“Yeah. I would have this dream at least once a year. Somebody would have to go. It was weird, crazy.” Did she ever get to the end of the dream? Did she have to choose?
“I usually woke up crying before that part,” she said. “I would offer myself, but that wasn’t an option. I couldn’t choose, but somebody would go off, and I wouldn’t see them anymore. I would think, How are you going to make it through your life without your mom? Because sometimes she would just be gone. I never chose, but it was always a debate. I was always trying to get out of it, and usually I woke up because it was just too much stress. You wake up breathing hard.”
She and her mother established a foundation in Lance Jr.’s honor, and each year it provides college scholarships to four students. She remains close to both her parents, after a period of estrangement from her father during her teenage years.
“He wasn’t there at some points, financially, when we could have used his help,” she said. “Vietnam had a lot to do with that, and he was dealing with a drug problem at that time. He was able to work through that stuff.”
Lance Owens is now a contractor, though he also provides security for his daughter on movie locations and has worked as her driver. “He doesn’t work for me, he works with me,” she corrected. “He’s really good at looking at the layout of a location and setting up a plan for proper security. I don’t put everything on him, though; Keith is my main security. My father and I are more buddylike. I can cuss around him. I wouldn’t even think of doing that around my mother. My father has always been cool like that. He’s well traveled; it’s easy to go places with him. He’s really tried to make an effort to make up for that lost time in his own way. I’m a forgiving person, so I’m cool with it.”
Her equanimity is enviable, though it helps to know that she wasn’t always so together. She admits to some wild behavior in her youth. She dabbled in drug dealing — “I did it a couple times to see if I could”; at 16 she had sex with a 40-year-old man and took $50 for it. There were other ill-considered moves: in 1995 she parked her BMW in Harlem, where she and her friend Sean Moon were carjacked and Moon was shot and critically injured in front of her. The following year when she was stopped for speeding, she was arrested when the police found a loaded .38-caliber pistol and marijuana in the car. She paid a fine and received two years’ probation.
She has learned to be less accessible through the years, refusing to say where she lives in either Los Angeles or New Jersey. “Everybody’s not your friend, it’s not safe,” she said. “Some people aren’t wrapped too tight. You’ve got to be careful.”
Speaking of which, the one imperfection on her otherwise flawless face is the scar front and center at the top of forehead. Would she say how she got it?
She laughed. “Playing tag with my brother,” she said. “I tripped over the telephone cord and hit my head on the corner of the bathroom wall. I got three stitches. Then I fell on my grandmother’s steps and busted it open again.”
How old was she?
“Three. I was a clumsy child. It took me a while to catch up. But I didn’t get hit with an iron for coming in late or anything like that. I probably should have a couple times.”
She maintains strong ties to her family, she said, including aunts, uncles, cousins and her father’s other children, though she says the basis for her self-confidence came from her parents.
“I know people who are twice as creative as I am, twice as smart,” she said, “but they didn’t do anything because they feared going into a room and opening their mouths. My parents told me to truly accomplish things in my life, there would be times I would have to stand alone. It may be scary, but that’s what it requires. So the times I had to stand alone, I got it. I understood where I was coming from, so hopefully, everybody else would get it eventually.”
She generally avoids reading about herself online. “A lot of people are crazy, cruel and negative,” she said. “They got a little too much time on their hands to discuss everybody else. I have a limited amount of energy to blow in a day. I’d rather read something that I like or watch a program I enjoy or ride my damn motorcycle or throw back a couple of shots of tequila with my friends. Laughing and joking and actually living life. To sit there reading about myself, I don’t see the point of it. I’m bein’ myself.”
One topic of persistent speculation on the Web is Queen Latifah’s sexuality, particularly a supposed romance with a female trainer. She has never addressed her relationships publicly and was in no mood to start. “I don’t have a problem discussing the topic of somebody being gay, but I do have a problem discussing my personal life,” she said. “You don’t get that part of me. Sorry. We’re not discussing it in our meetings, we’re not discussing it at Cover Girl. They don’t get it, he doesn’t get it” — she gestured upstairs, toward Compere’s office — “nobody gets that. I don’t feel like I need to share my personal life, and I don’t care if people think I’m gay or not. Assume whatever you want. You do it anyway.”
Clearly, the struggle for privacy is ongoing. It makes sense that she surrounds herself with friends and family, even on movie locations. “I meet a lot of new people, which is fun to me, but I don’t roll with a lot of new people,” she said. “I’m not Hollywood in a sense that I couldn’t wait to get there and hang out with every actress and rapper and entertainer. I was cool with me before all that. I didn’t need all these new people or famous people to validate my existence. I think that’s been a strength for sure and kept me grounded.”
It was time for her to leave. She walked me upstairs so I could say goodbye to Compere. No sooner had I turned to go than he was at her again about calling the guy she didn’t want to call. “Dana, come on,” I heard, but the door closed and I couldn’t hear her answer.
I waited a moment longer, but the door stayed closed. My bet was that she called. The previous day starred Cinderella. This day, like most others, it was the Fairy Godmother’s turn to step up and take care of business.
Da The New York Times Magazine, 5 Ottobre 2008

È una musicista, attrice cinematografica e televisiva, presidente di una casa discografica, autrice e imprenditrice. La Latifah è stata la prima artista hip hop alla quale sia stato tributato l’onore di una stella sulla Walk of Fame di Hollywood. Per il ritratto di Mama Morton in Chicago, premiato con un Oscar, ha ricevuto critiche entusiastiche, una candidatura all’Oscar come migliore attrice non protagonista, una candidatura ai Golden Globe e una candidatura ai SAG Award. In seguito, l’attrice ha recitato nel successo della Disney Un ciclone in casa (Bringing Down The House), di cui è stata anche produttrice esecutiva .
Il film drammatico per la televisione Life Support, di cui è stata sia interprete sia produttrice esecutiva, la vede nei panni di una madre che riesce a superare la dipendenza da crack e diventa un modello e un’attivista contro l’AIDS nella comunità in cui vive. Grazie a questo film, l’artista ha ottenuto critiche entusiastiche, oltre a vincere un Golden Globe e un SAG Award e a ottenere una candidatura a un Emmy. Ha recitato in Hairspray – Grasso è bello di Neil Meron e Craig Zadan, nel ruolo di Motormouth Maybelle, e in Mad Money, al fianco di Diane Keaton e Katie Holmes .

Nel film dello scorso anno La vita segreta delle api (The Secret Life of Bees), della Fox Searchlight Pictures, l’attrice ha recitato insieme a Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys e Dakota Fannning. Diretto da Gina PrinceBythewood, il film ha vinto il Film Award all’Hollywood Film Festival .
La Latifah ha partecipato a L’ultima vacanza (The Last Holiday) di Wayne Wang e a Beauty Shop (spinoff del successo La bottega del barbiere [Barbershop]), di cui ha anche curato la produzione. È poi apparsa in Vero come la finzione (Stranger Than Fiction) di Marc Forster, insieme a Emma Thompson e Dustin Hoffman, ed è stata la voce della mammuth Ellie in L’Era glaciale 2 – Il disgelo (Ice Age: The Meltdown) .
Nel 2007 è uscito il suo nuovo album, intitolato Trav’lin Light, che le ha fatto ottenere una candidatura ai Grammy. Coprodotto dal tre volte vincitore di un Grammy Tommy LiPuma, è l’atteso seguito del successo candidato a un Grammy The Dana Owens Album. L’album, che ha conquistato un disco di platino, è una raccolta di classici senza tempo scelti da Queen Latifah stessa .
Queen Latifah è una della maggiori cantanti rap sulla scena musicale. Con il suo entusiasmante esordio nel 1989 con All Hail the Queen, ha fissato gli standard visivi e contestuali della musica rap femminile. Ha ottenuto quattro candidature ai Grammy e ha vinto un Grammy per la migliore performance rap solista nel 1994. Oltre a ciò, ha girato gli Stati Uniti con il tour Sugar Water Festival insieme alle cantanti Erykah Badu e Jill Scott .
Con il socio Shakim Compere, la Latifah possiede e gestisce la società di produzioni Flavor Unit Entertainment. Con sede nel New Jersey, la società ha curato la produzione esecutiva del successo di cassetta Un ciclone in casa (Bringing Down The House), nonché di Beauty Shop. La Flavor Unit Entertainment ha coprodotto la commedia d’azione Bad Girls e prodotto The Cookout .
Dopo il debutto nel 1991 in Jungle Fever di Spike Lee, la sua carriera cinematografica è letteralmente decollata. Ha recitato in Set It Off, grazie al quale è stata candidata a uno Spirit Award come migliore attrice, e ha partecipato insieme a Holly Hunter e Danny DeVito all’acclamato Kiss (Living Out Loud). Nel 1999 ha preso parte a Il collezionista di ossa (The Bone Collector), diretto da Philip Noyce e interpretato da Denzel Washington .
Oltre alla musica, al cinema e alla televisione, Queen Latifah ha anche scritto un libro sull’autostima, intitolato Ladies First: Revelations of a Strong Woman. La prima serie televisiva dell’artista, “Living Single, è stato uno straordinario successo ed è in fase di cessione ad altri canali televisivi .
Ogni anno, l’artista copresiede la Lancelot H. Owens Scholarship Foundation, Inc. Istituita dalla madre, Rita Owens, in memoria del figlio scomparso, la Fondazione offre borse di studio a studenti che eccellono negli studi ma dispongono di limitate risorse finanziarie .