Taraji P Henson: A single mum’s success in Hollywood

Taraji Penda Henson is an Academy Award and Emmy-nominated actress, who starred as the iconic Cookie Lyon in the hit Fox television series Empire, attaining a Golden Globe Award. She is the first black actress to win the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a drama series.

Her classic film performances include Yvette in John Singleton’s Baby Boy, Shug in Hustle and Flow, Verney in the biographical Talk to Me, Terry in No Good Deed, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in the biopic Hidden Figures, and Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which secured her a 2008 Oscar nomination.

In May 7, 1995, as a 26-year-old single mother, Taraji collected her Bachelor of Fine Art at Howard University School of the Arts, in Washington DC, with her infant baby Marcell, in her arms.

Around the Way Girl is a compelling consternation of honest accounts of Taraji’s relentless passion for stagecraft. From the nefarious southeast Washington DC streets, where she witnessed her mother sustain a vicious assault and endure a robbery twice, to the campus life of the all-black Howard University, then to the burdensome existence as a black woman in Hollywood, California.

She was born and raised by her single mother, Bernice Gordon, in the crack cocaine-infested, crime-plagued boondocks of southeast DC. Taraji juggled working her evenings as a singing and dancing waitress, in a cruise ship, to pay her university fees while pregnant as a junior student.

She travelled to Hollywood, on a Buddy Pass she bought for one hundred dollars from an acquaintance, who worked for an airline. She only had $700 savings and baby Marcell on her hip.

She didn’t possess a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) card, which would legally authorise her to work as an actress. Within days of landing at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she jostled for work, signing up with a temporary employment agency and consummating a job at an accounting firm, earning a meagre $10 per hour.

Taraji played the single mum card to avoid being sent to far-flung areas like Beverly Hills and Woodland Hills for work. So that she could spend time with Marcell, who was staying in her cousin’s house. She later attained $500 a month lease for her own apartment.

She saved and bought a dilapidated Nissan Sentra and stationed a baby car seat at the back, without caring how it measured up to the top-of-the-range vehicles in the glamorous flatulence of Tinsel town. She used it to drive to work and movie auditions.

Taraji’s former manager at Howard, Linda Townsend, then linked her up to an agency to help her acquire the mandatory SAG card. She had to book three roles as an extra, and pay a $1,100 fee to join the union.

Two of those extra roles came on TV series Minor Adjustments and the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun. Every time she would book an acting vocation after that, the SAG union fee would be partially deducted. Until she was eventually a member of the bastion Screen Actors Guild.

She met a controversial movie agent, Vincent Cirrincione, whose roaster included the iconic Halle Berry. He affirmed to Taraji, he wasn’t interested in another actor. She was armed with a hilarious monologue and enthusiastically performed a presentation for Vincent. Spiritedly impressing him and captivatingly winning him as her agent.

In 2000, she auditioned for her breakthrough movie role Baby Boy, losing 10 pounds during the filming to the adverse distress of acting out the physical abuse she had brooked under her son’s father, Mark Johnson.

On February 2006, Taraji’s father died of liver cancer. She had to compartmentalise his death and her emotions and sing It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp, three days later. A hit song from Hustle & Flow feature film, which won an Oscar for Best Original Song at the 78th Academy Awards.

Soon after her father’s death, she began production as a principal actress in the critically acclaimed big budget movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In the film, set in New Orleans in 1918, she plays Queenie, the lead caregiver in a nursing home.

She only made $100,000, eventually pocketing less than $50,000 after taxes, agent and hotel fees, despite consistently persuading her agent Vincent to renegotiate with the Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers.

Her Caucasian principal co-stars, however, pocketed a sum of over $10 million in a movie that grossed over $335 million in the box office.

Preeminent producer, director and actor Tyler Perry contacted her shortly after, to commiserate and enlist her in a starring role in his 2009 movie I Can Do Bad All by Myself, offering her $500,000 and raising her future quotation to movie studios.

He provided her with a baseline pay she could negotiate with while instigating subsequent movie deals.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother