Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith in HBO's Bessie.
Before she became royalty, Queen Latifah was a troubled teen far from the kingdom she dreamed of.
At 17 she found herself stranded one night in New York, with no money to get home to New Jersey. “I hopped the turnstile and went to my mum’s cousin’s house in the Bronx. I knocked on the door at 5 o’clock in the morning and asked her can I stay? I was broke and didn’t have a way to get home,” she says, seated on the rooftop of a noisy film studio in Hollywood.
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