Biografie

Older brother Lance Owens, who was a police officer, died in an accident on the motorcycle Latifah had bought for him as a present. She still wears the motorcycle key around her neck.

First female rapper to be nominated for an Academy Award.

She was nicknamed Latifah (Arabic for delicate and sensitive) by a cousin while she was in her teens.

On a 2020 episode of Finding Your Roots (2012), research indicated that her paternal great-great-grandparents, Henry Coates and Edna Hallion, were an interracial married couple, with Henry being black and from Virginia and Edna being white and from New York. The two had married in 1906 and lived in New Jersey, where interracial marriage was never illegal. The show also found that Queen Latifah was descended from a line of free persons of color back to Juggy Owens, a midwife who was born c. 1766, and who was freed per her owner Mary Old in 1792.

As a fledgling rapper in 1987, she was first introduced by 16-year-old Jada Pinkett Smith as the opening act for hip-hop group Public Enemy at Baltimore's Palladium club before she even had a record deal.

I think it's important to create projects as an actor rather than wait for them. I love being able to take an idea and sell it to a studio.

I'm pretty much the same but trying to be better every day. I don't think the success has gone to my head. I don't think I'm alienating friends or losing friends.

I really don't know how to be anyone else, and whenever I try to be anyone else, I fail miserably. Or I disappoint myself. It doesn't build my self-esteem, and it doesn't help me grow me at all.

I'd like to have and adopt [children]. I think I'd be a great mom, honestly. I don't think I'll have any problem giving them all the love in the world. Discipline will be the hard part.

I wish every woman would love herself and embrace what she was given naturally.