She made her singing debut in the film, which was nominated for two Academy awards and won one. In 2005, Henson was in the independent film Hustle & Flow as Shug, the love interest of Terrence Howard, who portrayed the male lead DJay. Her first prominent role was in the 2001 comedy-drama film Baby Boy, where she portrayed Yvette, alongside singer Tyrese Gibson. Henson received her SAG membership card in the early 1990s for doing three roles as a background performer. To pay for college, she worked mornings as a secretary at The Pentagon and evenings as a singing-dancing waitress on a dinner-cruise ship, the Spirit of Washington. She attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where she intended to study electrical engineering, before transferring to Howard University to study drama. Henson graduated from Oxon Hill High School in Oxon Hill, Maryland, in 1988. She has said that North Pole explorer Matthew Henson was "the brother of my great-great-grandfather." According to a mitochondrial DNA analysis, her matrilineal lineage can be traced to the Masa people of Cameroon.
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Her first and middle names are of Swahili origin: Taraji ("hope") and Penda ("love"). She has often spoken of the influence of her maternal grandmother, Patsy Ballard, who accompanied her at the Academy Awards the year she was nominated.
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Henson was born September 11, 1970, in Southeast Washington, D.C., the daughter of Bernice ( née Gordon), a corporate manager at Woodward & Lothrop, and Boris Lawrence Henson, a janitor and metal fabricator. 2.2 Hidden Figures and beyond (2015–present).
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Also that year, she was praised for her starring role as Katherine Johnson in the critically acclaimed drama film Hidden Figures, for which she won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. That year, she released a New York Times best selling autobiography titled Around the Way Girl. In 2016, Time named Henson one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She also won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for Emmy Awards in 20.
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In 2015 she began starring as Cookie Lyon in the Fox drama series Empire, for which she became the first African-American woman to win a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series. She starred in the ensemble films Think Like a Man (2012) and its 2014 sequel. From 2011 to 2013, she co-starred as Detective Jocelyn Carter in the CBS drama Person of Interest, for which she won an NAACP Image Award.
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In 2011, she starred in the Lifetime Television film Taken from Me: The Tiffany Rubin Story, which brought her a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie. Henson has also had an extensive and successful career in television, including series such as The Division, Boston Legal and Eli Stone. In 2010, she appeared in the action comedy Date Night, and co-starred in the remake of The Karate Kid. She played a prostitute in Hustle & Flow (2005), for which she received a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture nomination and a single mother of a disabled child in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), for which she received Academy Award, SAG Award and Critics Choice Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress. She studied acting at Howard University and began her Hollywood career in guest roles on several television shows before making her breakthrough in Baby Boy (2001). Taraji Penda Henson ( / t ə ˈ r ɑː dʒ i/ tə- RAH-jee born September 11, 1970) is an American actress and singer.