Queen Latifah never acts as though she needs the part. She walks on, looks about her and lets the film come to her, which is why she is at her best in musicals and least stretched in the comedies built around her.
Fi1m perspective
Most of the cast of Rob Marshall's Chicago (2002) are visibly working. Queen Latifah, as the jail matron Mama Morton, is not, or does not let us see it. She sings 'When You're Good to Mama' as a woman naming her price to people who are going to pay it, and she does not push the number so much as wait for it. Our review put her beside Catherine Zeta-Jones as the two performers who knew exactly what film they were in. We sat up when she came on, and it took a minute to see why: nobody else on screen was that relaxed, and in a film cut that fast, relaxation reads as authority.
That is her whole method, and it took her a while to find a screen for it. She was a rapper first, with All Hail the Queen in 1989, and came to acting through small film parts from 1991, Jungle Fever among them, and five seasons of the sitcom Living Single (1993 to 1998). Set It Off (1996) gave her a lead, as Cleo Sims, a bank robber in an outlaw ensemble, and a following. Chicago gave her the rest of the industry. What followed was a run of leads in comedies and musicals, voice work in the Ice Age films, producing through Flavor Unit, Hairspray (2007) as Motormouth Maybelle, and, on television, Bessie (2015), which she also produced, and The Equalizer (2021), in which she plays Robyn McCall.
The pattern in that list is plain. She is best where there is a song. The stillness that becomes authority when she is about to sing can, in a comedy written around her, look like a performer waiting for the film to catch up. The mainstream comedies she led drew mixed notices, Bringing Down the House (2003) among them; we have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, but the pattern fits.
There is a smaller lesson in Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction (2006), where she plays Penny Escher. We liked the film, and our review had nothing in particular to say about her. In a picture with no use for her voice and no room for her to take charge, she does the job and nothing more. That is a choice, not a failing. It is also a waste.
She has said that she lives to do a musical, that there is nothing like it anywhere else in the film business. She has also said she looks for parts that show what a woman is capable of, which accounts for the matrons, the singers and, now, the fixer on television. Give her a song. The rest she can manage in her sleep, and sometimes it looks as though she does.
Biography
Queen Latifah is an American actor, rapper and singer. Born Dana Elaine Owens on 18 March 1970 in Newark, New Jersey, she began her career in hip-hop before moving into acting with early film roles including Jungle Fever (1991).
She starred as Khadijah James in the television series Living Single (1993–1998). Her performance as Matron 'Mama' Morton in the musical film Chicago (2002) earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Queen Latifah played Penny Escher in Stranger Than Fiction (2006). She has also appeared in films such as The Bone Collector (1999), Bringing Down the House (2003) and 22 Jump Street (2014), and provided the voice of Ellie in the Ice Age animated series.
