Queen Latifah Turns 55! Do You Remember Her Early TV Career?
55 years ago today, Dana Elaine Owens was born — though you more likely know her under the moniker she’s used to become a household name: Queen Latifah. After getting her start in the ’80s a precocious teen rapper (and landing her first top 10 Billboard hit, “Ladies First,” at the age of 19), Latifah began an acting career, racking up Emmys, Golden Globes, and even an Oscar nomination in the process.
But years before she headlined classic musicals like Chicago, rom-coms like Last Holiday, dramas like Set It Off, or TV staples like The Equalizer (now in its fifth season), Queen Latifah got her start on the small screen, showing up on sitcoms starring fellow musicians, and a Fox ensemble comedy that some think provided a spark of inspiration for Sex and the City.
The Fresh Prince and the Queen
Latifah was nominated for her first Grammy in 1991 — the same year she officially began her acting career. Her first TV acting appearance was on the 25th episode of the first season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air — she played Marissa Redman, a bossy Hollywood actress who takes Hilary Banks (Karyn Parsons) on as her assistant, and demands a date with Will, played by fellow ’80s and ’90s hip-hop sensation Will Smith.
@tommyboyrecords Queen Latifah stars as “Marissa Redman” in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s “Working It Out” S1 E25 (Original air date May 6, 1991) #thefreshprinceofbelair #queenlatifah #television #cameo #hiphop #tommyboyrecords ♬ original sound – TommyBoyRecords
She then came back in the second season of the show … as a completely different character. In “She Ain’t Heavy,” which aired on Nov. 4, 1991, Latifah played Dee Dee Williams, a new girl in town who gets set up on a blind date with Will. Though she and Will hit it off, he’s anxious that if he invites her to his school dance, he’ll take heat from his friends for dating a girl who is plus-sized. The two feud, but eventually realize they like each other too much to be kept apart by what anyone else thinks.
In a 2018 interview with People TV, Latifah recalled that “Will gave me my first job on TV…I had never even acted on anything on television, ever. Thank god he had a dope director in Ellen Falcon at the time, who kind of showed me what to do, how to hit a mark, and ‘here’s how you do this.’ She later became our director on Living Single, so she pretty much taught me how to act. Because I was using instincts, but I didn’t know what I was doing. You know, I was Queen Latifah the rapper, using whatever high school play skills I had, you know?…Will, of course, and Jada, have been there my entire career.”
Living Single …and the city?
After additional appearances in the movies House Party 2 and the Tupac Shakur film Juice, Queen Latifah landed her first major starring role in 1993 — as journalist and magazine editor Khadijah James on the Fox ensemble sitcom Living Single. The show, which also starred Kim Coles, Erika Alexander and Kim Fields, followed four single young women as they negotiated life and love as twenty-somethings with glamorous careers in New York City.
Living Single ran for five seasons on Fox, and remains popular to this day in syndication; it’s credited as a ground-breaking show, the first comedy on network TV to focus on the lives of young Black women. As Kim Coles said in a 1993 interview with Entertainment Tonight, “The whole point is that something like this has not been done before.” In a 2022 interview on The Drew Barrymore Show, Latifah seconded that thought, noting, “We did something that wasn’t on TV.” She also said that the show had been rediscovered by a new generation, and that she was open to a reboot: “I would do anything with the cast of Living Single. We’re on a group chat to this day.”
But the show’s most complicated legacy today is that many think it was an unacknowledged inspiration for HBO mega-hit Sex and the City. That show, which debuted in 1998 (the year Living Single went off the air), also followed a group of young, single female friends in New York City negotiating glamorous careers and dramatic love lives — each of whom embodied over-the-top types (the sarcastic one, the dreamy romantic, the man-eater, etc) and one of whom (like Latifah’s character) was a writer.
the characters from living single and sex and the city are mad similar. sinclair is charlotte, maxine is miranda, regine is samantha and kadijah is carrie.
— JADALAREIGN (@JADALAREIGN) November 21, 2019
Afterschool Specials and Science Guys
In the late ’90s, especially after Living Single wrapped in 1998, Queen Latifah began to focus on her film career. But before that, she made a number of TV guest appearances, almost always as herself — in the 1994 ABC Afterschool Special “I Hate the Way I Look,” on a 1997 episode of Ellen, and in the Jon Lovitz animated series The Critic. But perhaps most unexpectedly, she showed up briefly in a 1994 episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, to explain … queen bees.
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