Queen Latifah Arrested On DUI Charge
Police say actress-rapper Queen Latifah was arrested for investigation of driving under the influence of alcohol early Wednesday.
Officer Alex Delgadillo, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, says the hip-hop star was driving in North Hollywood when she was stopped about 3:15 a.m. for making an unsafe lane change.
"They found that she was under the influence. It was a routine arrest," said Delgadillo.
He says the 32-year-old artist, who was driving a 2003 Cadillac Escalade, presented a valid New Jersey driver's license bearing her given name, Dana Owens, and then failed a sobriety test.
She was booked, released on $2,500 bail, and ordered to appear in court for hearing on December 11.
Latifah comes from a law enforcement family - both her dad and her brother were police officers - but this isn't her first brush with the law.
In 1996, Latifah pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to a misdemeanor weapons charge after a California Highway Patrol officer found a loaded gun in her car-door compartment when she was stopped for speeding on a freeway.
The previous year she was the victim of a carjacking in New York City in which a companion was shot.
Latifah rose to prominence as a feminist rapper with her 1989 debut, "All Hail the Queen," which posed a sharp contrast to the misogynist rhymes of many of her male counterparts at the time. She won a Grammy Award in 1995 for best rap solo performance for "U.N.I.T.Y."
She branched into acting in 1993 as a cast member on the sitcom "Living Single," which ran for five years. She hosted her own TV talk show, which ran from 1999 to 2001, and has appeared in films such as "Jungle Fever," "House Party 2" and the recent romantic comedy "Brown Sugar."
Latifah has two movies hitting the theaters next month - the much-talked about "Chicago," with Richard Gere, Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones - and "Pinnochio," the English-dubbed version of the new film by Roberto Benigni, in which she is the voice of a dove.
Also in the works is "Bringing Down the Houze," a comedy set for release next year, in which she portrays an inmate who finds love on the Internet and breaks out to be with the object of her affections, an ordinary guy whose life is thrown into upheaval as a result.