Taraji P. Henson took a circuitous route to acting. Literally. She studied electrical engineering in college after her failure to get into an arts high school in her native Washington, D.C., made her believe she couldn't act.
"I was like, 'Eeny meeny miney mo . . . electrical engineering,' " she says, but the endeavor, well, it short-circuited when she failed pre-calculus. Her father took that as proof she should be acting. "He basically said, 'I told you so. Come back and do what you're supposed to be doing in life.' So I'm just glad I failed."
Henson's best-known role is perhaps Shug, the hooker with a heart of gold -- and the pipes of platinum -- in "Hustle & Flow" (2005). In "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," she plays Queenie, the proprietor of a New Orleans seniors home at the end of World War I who takes in an abandoned infant with the physical characteristics of an 80-year-old man. Over the years, the elderly-looking child gets younger and a lot more handsome (he's played by Brad Pitt), falls in love with a childhood friend (Cate Blanchett) and learns about life and death from a unique perspective. Henson's warmly maternal performance, in which she ages from 26 to 71, has been earning her accolades coming and going, including a Critics' Choice nomination and two from the Screen Actors Guild (for female support and cast -- she also shares a cast nod for her work on TV's "Boston Legal").
"I think the message I got from the film is that nobody's guaranteed the next hour," she says. "You really shouldn't fear death because it's inevitable. We're just passing through. When you think about life like that, it's really not that deep. Seeing it for the first time, I just had such a new, profound respect for life, a whole 'nother outlook.
"But I'll tell you who the character is a combination of: my mother and my grandmother. My mother doesn't shake hands; she'll ball her fists up. She hugs. She'll do the -- [Henson excitedly claps her hands twice and throws open her arms, eyes squinting hard in the smile]."
"My grandmother, she had a get-together right before I went into production. She had eight children, five of them women, one being my mom. There was a woman there for every age I had to portray. I just sat back and watched them, how they embraced age. My grandmother was just very . . . hands," she says, flitting her hands about like hummingbirds with fingers for wings. "It was the hands."
