Queen Latifah stars in 'Life Support', which premieres Saturday, March 10, on HBO.

Elegantly coiffed and dressed with understated chic, Queen Latifah fits right into her current surroundings, a luxury hotel suite in Southern California. At 36, the former 'queen of hip hop' has a Grammy Award and an Oscar nomination to her credit, which helps explain the aura of calm self-confidence that surrounds her. If she's sitting pretty at the moment, however, Latifah still hasn't forgotten a time when her life could have gone in a very different direction.

It was those memories, she explains, that made her feel compelled to star in and executive produce Life Support, an HBO movie premiering Saturday, March 10. The fact-based project, on which Oscar winner Jamie Foxx also was an executive producer, casts Latifah as HIV-positive wife and mother Ana Wallace, a recovering addict who pours her anger and regrets into working for an AIDS outreach group in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The story is largely drawn from the life of Andrea Williams, the sister of Life Support director and co-writer Nelson George, but Latifah says she recognised the characters in the script even before she met Williams.

"I grew up around them," she says. "I grew up in New Jersey, but during my wild days I spent plenty of time in New York. I know these streets, andI know how these kinds of things happen. I know how you can drift into experimenting with drugs and how families can be fractured by addiction to drugs. And after talking with Andrea, I knew I could do this, that I could pull it off. I felt that we connected on that level."

"Latifah embodies the spirit these women have," George says. "I think this is one of the first roles she has had that has allowed her to project the totality of her being. She embodies a certain strength and dignity in her work, and it seemed that it was a natural fit."

Drawn to dangerous inner-city life

While Latifah herself grew up in the suburbs, part of a family that included several police officers, she still felt drawn to the more exciting and dangerous inner-city neighbourhoods of New York during her teen years, she says.

"There were times in my own life when I definitely had to make a decision: Do I go this way or that way?" Latifah recalls. "Fortunately, a lot of things in my life were just an adventure, seeing what I could and couldn't do. I wouldn't go too far in certain situations. I would pull myself out in the nick of time - or maybe the angels would pull me out.

"I always had New Jersey to fall back on. I didn't have to live in Brooklyn, where I was playing. I was living in East Orange, which is kind of a lower middle-class neighbourhood, but you never had to go far to be in either an upper-class neighbuorhood or a lower one. I can remember coming home, worn out from partying and being around so much poverty and homelessness (in the city) that I was worn down. It was good to see the trees and grass, and I knew that I should slow down. I was probably 17, which tells you how fast I was living and how many identities I was experimenting with, how many possible paths were in front of me. I was definitely ready to take it down a notch."

She knows she was one of the lucky ones, both for pulling herself back from the brink and for retreating to a safe haven athome. That's an option far too many inner-city teenagers don't have, Latifah says.

"Growing up in the inner city, you're always at risk," she says. "You're at risk for being killed before your time, at risk for learning about things that you should never know by the age of 10, for falling into the pitfalls of the ghetto, basically. Where there are poverty and drugs, there are a lot of traps. Anywhere you have normal human beings who are sexual creatures who are experimenting and feeling their hormones and a natural attraction to the opposite sex, there's a chance that you might ... not always practice safe sex.

"You might be trying this stuff way too early, so you're not mentally ready (to take precautions). Every kid also goes through peer pressure situations, and some kids are not prepared by their parents. There are also a lot of cultural pressures. In male-dominated cultures, there's a strong pressure not to use condoms. The woman doesn't have a choice. Andrea -- the real Andrea, the activist -- is out there on the streets every day, fighting for change, to stop the spread of AIDS and HIV."

While she is relieved that HIV infection no longer is an automatic death sentence, Latifah says she fears that for many people, the threat of AIDS has become minimised.

"We've seen the faces of certain survivors of AIDS, and they appear to be totally healthy," she says. "I read an article recently in which Magic Johnson was talking about how it isn't as easy as it may look on the surface. Everyone's scenario is different: how they respond to the drugs, as well as all the other diseases out there that can seriously affect you. Even a simple little thing like a cold may affect you in a different way.

"It's certainly true that there is a devastating epidemic going on in Africa, but there truly is an epidemic here in America, too, and we aren't even taking care of ourselves here. It's definitely bad over in Africa, because the basic infrastructure is just not in place, but we need to focus on our country as well."

John Crook, Zap2it