'I KNOW people who are twice as creative as I am, twice as smart," says Queen Latifah, "but they didn't do anything because they feared going into a room and opening their mouths. My parents told me (that] 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. The times I had to stand alone, I got it."
At 38, Latifah 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 empo
werment 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 her jazz-vocals on The Dana Owens Album (Latifah's birth name), which went gold. Later this year she will release a new rap album produced by Dr Dre.
"I learned early," she says, "that I had to work harder than the white kids and harder than the boys."
Since 1991, when she had 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. Her latest film, The Secret Life Of Bees, is released this week in the US, and on December 5 in the UK. Based on the best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, it also stars Dakota Fanning, Sophie Okonedo, Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson.
"I found a lot of my mom in this role, which is not something I ordinarily do," says Latifah.
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 says. "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."
With her mother Rita Owens and her childhood friend Shakim Compere, Latifah founded Flavor Unit Entertainment, a management and production company, when she was 20.
Latifah's mother married when she was 16. They had a son, Lance Jr, who was two years older than Latifah. When she was eight, 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. 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".
"I don't know if I ever recovered completely," she says 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. 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.'"
Latifah admits to some wild behaviour in her youth. She dabbled in drug dealing – "I did it a couple times to see if I could." 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-calibre pistol and marijuana in the car.
One topic of persistent speculation is Queen Latifah's sexuality, particularly a supposed romance with a female trainer. She has never addressed her relationships publicly and is 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 says. "You don't get that part of me. Sorry. 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."
• The Secret Life Of Bees is released in the UK on December 5
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