Given her stunning looks, it's fitting that Lathan's first name means "work of art" in Swahili. Happily, this bombshell's talent is equal to her aesthetic appeal. The daughter of a Broadway hoofer and a veteran TV director, this "work of art" was inevitably artistically inclined, studying dance and acting as a child. After graduating from the Yale School of Drama, she guested on a number of TV shows, eventually winning a series-regular spot in 1998 on the short-lived Nightline spoof Lateline. That same year, Lathan made much more of an impression with a small but memorably oedipal part as Wesley Snipes' mama in the vampire flick Blade. A string of successively larger roles in African-American-oriented movies upped her profile, two of them---1999's The Wood and 2000's Love & Basketball---opposite her then-boyfriend, Omar Epps. In the latter, she and Epps were perfectly matched physically as both lovers and competitive athletes, and Lathan won a number of awards (Image, Black Reel and BET) for her multifaceted performance. But it was her turn as a butt-kicking beauty in the wildly successful 2004 thriller Alien vs. Predator that made her a familiar face to the masses, even if the flick showed off her body more than her brains. A Tony-nominated turn in the Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun that same year proved she could still deliver a thoughtful performance. In 2006, she signed on to the sexy series Nip/Tuck as the mysterious boss of two morally challenged plastic surgeons, and in 2009, she began voice-over work on Fox's The Cleveland Show.