Success no secret to Latifah

Latifah's character, August Boatwright, who lives in a big house in South Carolina with her two sisters, does take in two troubled strangers, played by Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Hudson, but it's a tough love that she shows them.

"It's not just, 'Come here, baby, everything's going to be all right.' It's, 'Damn, really? Is that what happened? Oh, OK. Imagine what you must be living with.'"

Instead it's the bees the Boatwrights raise for their honey, Latifah said, that her character treats like babies. So, too, did the actress.

"Those poor bees, they're having a hard time right now. The collapsed hive syndrome, they've been going through it," said the actress during a recent interview at a Midtown Manhattan hotel. "I was like, 'Look guys, I'm not going to smash one of you all, just don't sting me, I'll be very gentle.' And they were very kind to me. They get moody sometimes, especially when it's cold outside, and we shot on some chilly days."

Newark, N.J., native Latifah, who got her start as a rapper, doesn't give off the larger-than-life vibe in person that she so often projects on screen. She is soft-spoken, and a smile never leaves her face.

But then, this is the Latifah of age 38, who seems to have left hip-hop behind for jazz in her musical career, and is a calmer presence on a movie set than perhaps she once was, at least to hear her tell it.

"I quit smoking when I did this movie 'The Last Holiday' (released in 2006). We shot it in New Orleans pre-Katrina, you dig? I quit smoking like a month before I went down there and started working out. I stopped drinking to help with not smoking," she said. "I don't know who else was in New Orleans not drinking and smoking other than me. I was like, 'If I don't quit now I'm going to hurt myself in this town.'"

The South Carolina set of "The Secret Life of Bees" presented no such challenges to the Queen Latifah of 2008.

"I just felt connected, to where we were and what was going on at the moment," she said —- "more than any film that I've done in a long time."

In addition to Fanning and Hudson, Latifah also worked with Alicia Keys and Sophie Okenedo on this film, which opens in theaters today. The two play August's sisters.

"It's probably the thing that drew me the most to this script, was that you get to see these dynamic women. Everybody's different from one to the next. I think for the longest time in Hollywood that has been the major complaint of African-Americans, the fact that we were relegated to the maid, to the comedian, or the criminal," said Latifah.

"Here's three women in a home that they own, a business that they own, educated, cultured, interesting women who have a sense of style about them, and they're all completely different. See, that's the South I remember."

The film, based on the novel by Sue Monk Kidd, takes place in 1964 just weeks after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. With Fanning the only white person living in a house full of black people, race is an issue in the story.

While Latifah growing up had relatives in Maryland and Virginia, "I've experienced some racism right here in New York. Just try to get a cab, you'll feel it. They'll pass me to pick you up," she said. "That immediately connects you to how painful it is to be discriminated against, or when your mother can't get a home loan when her white counterpart —- same amount of kids, same credit, same job —- can get a loan. That's the kind of things that affected me as a kid that I can remember, the fact that we couldn't get a house like the people up the street."

Latifah spent a good deal of time emphasizing the importance of voting during this interview, given the political season. In the film, Fanning's character and an African-American boy (played by Tristan Wilds) experience racism when they are seen together in town.

"They see the hope and the possibility, all this stuff that's happening in the world doesn't even exist, until the world comes in and stings them. But they don't lose it, the youth are not jaded yet," she said. "Most of the people who fight these wars are under 25. The people who change the world —- under 25. They've got to understand how powerful their voices are and how it's important that they let them be heard."