Taraji Penda Henson was born September 11, 1970. She is an American actress who has received several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for an Academy Award and four Primetime Emmy Awards.
After studying acting at Howard University, she made her film debut in the crime film Streetwise (1998). Henson gained recognition for playing a prostitute in Hustle & Flow (2005) and a single mother in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). The latter earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2016, she portrayed mathematician Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures. She has also acted in Baby Boy (2001), The Karate Kid (2010), Think Like a Man (2012), Acrimony (2018), What Men Want (2019), The Best of Enemies (2019), and The Color Purple (2023).
Henson has also had an extensive career in television. From 2011 to 2013, she co-starred as Joss Carter in the CBS drama series Person of Interest. From 2015 to 2020, she starred as Cookie Lyon in the Fox drama series Empire, for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama and was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards in 2015 and 2016. Her other Emmy-nominated roles were for the Lifetime movie Taken from Me: The Tiffany Rubin Story (2011) and for her guest role in the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary (2023).
In 2016, Time named Henson one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Later that year, she released a New York Times best selling autobiography titled Around the Way Girl. In 2019, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of .
