Drama Queen

On the phone, her father, Boris Henson, remembers: "I just wanted to keep my daughter and me close. . . . When I went into being homeless, she was 11. She knew everything, she followed my life like a person following a map. Every time I would get to the next step, she was so excited, 'Oh Daddy, we've got a mattress and an apartment!' We didn't want any furniture. We decided we could roller-skate through the kitchen.

"She was my best buddy."

In time, Boris Henson found a job working at RFK Stadium as a janitor. (Her mother, Bernice, worked her way up to a management position at Woodward & Lothrop.) Meanwhile, Taraji, her dad says, was always a "big pretender," ever since she was a teeny thing, always living in a dream world, pretending to be someone else.

As a young teen, she was turned down for a slot in the acting program at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She was devastated. After graduating from Oxon Hill High School in 1988, she matriculated at North Carolina A&T, ostensibly to study electrical engineering. She lasted a year.

"She told me, 'Oooh, Daddy, that's not what I want to do for the rest of my life and be happy,' " says Boris Henson. "I said, 'So get on with what you're supposed to do.' "

At Howard, she thrived, learning every aspect of theater, from singing to dancing to acting to hanging lights. She worked two jobs. She made the dean's list. And she won a coveted "Triple Threat" scholarship from Howard alums Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad.

Then, her junior year, she found herself pregnant. She decided she was keeping the baby -- and her performance schedule.

"I never sat down," Henson remembers. "I went to [the theater professors] and said, 'Don't you bench me because I'm pregnant.' "

They didn't. Her first trimester, she acted in a Greek tragedy (she's convinced that's why her son, at 11, is so melodramatic today). In her second trimester she performed in "Dreamgirls," singing, dancing, the whole shebang. After Marcell was born, she kept going to class, books in one hand, infant carrier in the other.

"I never stopped," Henson says. "I spit that baby out and kept it moving. I just threw him on my back and said, 'C'mon baby, we're about to go here .' "

"There was always that danger of our young people of getting pregnant and leaving school. But she buckled it out," says Mike Malone, professor of musical theater at Howard. "She's a strong girl. She has a lot of nerve." (Two other Howard alums are featured in the movie, Paula Jai Parker and Anthony Anderson.)

Henson started out as a comedic actress, Malone says, but quickly developed a flair for drama. She had a knack, he says, for milking a moment out of nothing. She'd begged him for a role in "Dreamgirls," a production that was slated to tour Hong Kong. Yes, begged. So he tossed her a walk-on part. Her role: to move a clothes rack from stage left to stage right during a rehearsal scene in the musical.