Taraji P. Henson

 Taraji Penda Henson (pronounced t@-RAH'jee; September 11, 1970) was an American actress. She trained in acting at Howard University and began her Hollywood career with guest roles in a variety of TV shows before becoming a star with Baby Boy (2001). She played a prostitute in Hustle & Flow (2005) in which she was awarded an award called the Screen Actors Guild Award in Outstanding Performance for the Cast in a Motion Picture nomination. In 2008, she portrayed the role of a single mom with a child who is disabled in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) for which she received Critics Choice Award, SAG Award as well as Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress. In 2010, she starred in the comedy Date Night, and co-starred in the remake of The Karate Kid alongside Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan.Henson has also had an extensive and lucrative career in the field of television, with series such as The Division, Boston Legal and Eli Stone. She appeared in Taken from Me: Tiffany Rubin Story for Lifetime Television in 2011, which led to her being nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Movie or Limited Series. She also starred in Person of Interest from 2011 until 2013. In recognition of this, she was awarded the NAACP Image Award. She was a part of the ensemble films Think Like a Man (2012) and its 2014 sequel. She began her career as Cookie Lyon in Fox's drama series Empire in 2015. In 2015, she was the first woman of African descent in television to be awarded the Critics Choice Television Award for the Best Drama Series Actress. She was also nominated for Emmy Awards 2015 and 2016. Time named Henson as one of the top 100 influential people in the world in 2016. She also published Around the Way Girl, an acclaimed New York Times bestseller. [4] She was also acknowledged for her role in the film as NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, which won her the Screen Actors Guild Award in Outstanding Performance by a Cast in an Motion Picture.