Film writer Steve Pratt talks to Queen Latifah, who with nine pictures in various stages of development, is on her way to becoming movie royalty.

WHEN Queen Latifah won an Oscar nomination as warden Mama Morton in the musical Chicago, it was only the tip of her career iceberg. She is, to borrow a phrase from her press biography, "a one-woman entertainment conglomerate".

Her list of achievements takes in award-winning rapper, talk show host, her own TV series, and partner in a company managing some of the biggest names in music.

After her 1992 film debut, she worked steadily on the big screen until her knockout performance as Mama Morton confirmed her star status.

Her executive producer credit on her latest movie, starring opposite Steve Martin in Bringing Down The House, is evidence of her increasing influence. Scripts are having sex changes to adapt male leading roles for her. "A lot of these parts can be changed, racially or sexually. You just need a creative team of visionaries who can see a movie in a different way to what it was originally written," she says.

"I'm able to show all these different sides. I've gone from playing a bank robber to a lounge singer to a prison warden to an ex-inmate, a girl from the hood who bum-rushes her way into this guy's house and changes his life around.

"It's like you've seen sensitive, physical, angry, soft, and you've seen singing. It's taken time but I've finally been able to penetrate a lot of the minds of people in and out of Hollywood. Different kinds of producers who do business in the States are changing roles for me, and seeing a lot more action or physical things I can do.

"And still there are sensitive things that require me to dig deep into being very emotional. They tend to be a little harder to play than jumping up on the counter sticking out a gun and saying 'give me the money'. The attention has opened up doors for me than may not have been opened to the degree they are now. I'm ducking scripts."

One was Bringing Down The House. As prison escapee Charlene, she invades the home of an attorney and blackmails him into proving her innocence. It's an odd couple comedy in which uptight white lawyer collides with a larger-than-life resident of the hip hop community.

Latifah was asked at an early stage to produce and check out the script. "There were things that needed correcting, and they wanted someone who could not only represent African-Americans and say, 'hey this isn't gonna fly, this has to go, that has to go', but also with a sensibility to say do we want to play this humour as real or as ridiculous things that would never happen in real life," she says.

"We decided we wanted all the humour to come from more real places. Primarily, my work as executive producer was done before the movie started, and I was able to sit back and rehearse, just be an actor and improve and bring more natural stuff to the script."

In one scene, she uses her fists rather than her voice when she and a female rival have a no-holds-barred fight. She jokes they hope to win an MTV fight scene award next year, while paying tribute to the stunt women.

"It took about a week to shoot all of that scene because you have to do all of the stunt double work, and then we shot the entire scene ourselves. It was very physical, we were all sore the next day," she says.

"That's actually my favourite scene in the movie. It's just so funny and goes against the stereotypical the black girl can always beat the white girl thing. She actually gives it to Charlene, which makes it more fun.

"We did pretty much everything the stunt women did, and they only cut when it was something that was really difficult to fake. It's violent, but it's funny. I thought it was a nice even fight which you don't see very often, which is more realistic."

As a youngster, she was involved in playground fights - as the one breaking them up. Her father, a Vietnam vet and police officer, taught her and her brother to fight at an early age. "But we weren't taught to be bullies. I hated seeing people tear each other apart, so I was always the one jumping into the middle of the fight," she recalls.

"Not one of them could beat me and I could fight. I'd try to get them apart. I probably only had a few fights in my life and those have been in the hip hop clubs on tour in the early 1990s."

A lot of musicals were offered after Chicago, but that movie was special and she hesitates to do another one. She still hopes that a film about singer Bessie Smith, first mooted a decade ago, will be revived. "At that time no one was willing to spend 35 million dollars on a musical," she says. "I'd still like to play her because she had an interesting story, although I don't want to get pigeonholed in musicals."

* Bringing Down The House (12A) is now showing in cinemas.