Lauryn Hill (born May 26, 1975) is an American singer, songwriter, rapper, producer, and actress. She is best known for being a member of the Fugees and for her solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Raised in South Orange, New Jersey, Hill began singing with her music-oriented family during her childhood. She enjoyed success as an actress at an early age, appearing in a recurring role on the television soap opera As the World Turns and starring in the film Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. In high school, Hill was approached by Pras Michel to start a band, which his cousin, Wyclef Jean, soon joined. They renamed themselves the Fugees and released two studio albums, Blunted on Reality (1994) and the Grammy Award-winning The Score (1996), which sold six million copies in the United States. In the latter record, Hill rose to prominence with her African-American and Caribbean music influences, her rapping and singing, and a rendition of the hit "Killing Me Softly". Hill's tumultuous romantic relationship with Jean led to the split of the band in 1997, after which she began to focus on solo projects.
Lauryn Hill was born on May 26, 1975, in East Orange, New Jersey to English teacher Valerie Hill and computer and management consultant Mal Hill. She has one older brother named Malaney (born c. 1972). Her Baptist family moved to New York and Newark for short periods until settling in South Orange, New Jersey. She had a middle-class upbringing, knowing both many white, Jewish families and many black ones.
Hill has said of her musically oriented family: "there were so many records, so much music constantly being played. My mother played piano, my father sang, and we were always surrounded in music." Her father did indeed sing in local nightclubs and at weddings. While growing up, Hill frequently listened to Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Gladys Knight;[10] years later she recalled playing Marvin Gaye's What's Going On repeatedly until she fell asleep to it.
In middle school, Hill performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" before a basketball game. Due to its popularity, subsequent games featured a recording of her rendition. In 1988, Hill appeared as an Amateur Night contestant on It's Showtime at the Apollo. She sang her own version of the Smokey Robinson track "Who's Lovin' You?", garnering an initially harsh reaction from the crowd. She persevered, though she later cried off-stage.
Hill attended Columbia High School where she was a member of the track team, a cheerleader and was a classmate of Zach Braff. She also took violin lessons, went to dance class, and founded the school's gospel choir. Academically, she took advanced placement classes and received primarily 'A' grades. School officials recognized her as a leader among the student body. Later recalling her education, Hill commented, "I had a love for – I don't know if it was necessarily for academics, more than it just was for achieving, period. If it was academics, if it was sports, if it was music, if it was dance, whatever it was, I was always driven to do a lot in whatever field or whatever area I was focusing on at the moment."
While a freshman in high school, through mutual friends, Prakazrel "Pras" Michel approached Hill about a music group he was creating. Hill and Pras began under the name Tranzlator Crew, chosen because they wanted to rhyme in different languages. Another female vocalist was soon replaced by Michel's cousin, multi-instrumentalist Wyclef Jean. The group began performing in local showcases and high school talent shows. Hill was initially only a singer, but then learned to rap too; instead of modeling herself on female rappers like Salt-n-Pepa and MC Lyte, she preferred male rappers like Ice Cube and developed her flow from listening to them. Hill later said, "I remember doing my homework in the bathroom stalls of hip-hop clubs."
Hill took acting lessons in Manhattan while growing up.She began her acting career in 1991, appearing with Jean in Club XII, MC Lyte's Off-Broadway hip-hop rendering of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. While the play was not a success, an agent noticed her. Later that year, Hill began appearing on the soap opera As the World Turns in a recurring role as troubled teenager Kira Johnson.
At 21 years old, the now-famous Hill was still living at home with her parents. She had been enrolled at Columbia University during this period, and considered majoring in history as she became a sophomore, but left after about a year of total studies once sales of The Score went into the millions. In 1996, Hill responded to a false rumor on The Howard Stern Show that she had made a racist comment on MTV, saying "How can I possibly be a racist? My music is universal music. And I believe in God. If I believe in God, then I have to love all of God's creations. There can be no segregation."
In 1996, Hill founded the Refugee Project, a non-profit outreach organization that sought to transform the attitudes and behavior of at-risk urban youth.Part of this was Camp Hill, which offered stays in the Catskill Mountains for such youngsters; another was production of an annual Halloween haunted house in East Orange.Hill also raised money for Haitian refugees, supported of clean well water building projects in Kenya and Uganda, and staged a rap concert in Harlem to promote voter registration. A 1997 benefit event for the Refugee Project introduced a Board of Trustees for the organization that included Sean Combs, Mariah Carey, Busta Rhymes, Spike Lee, and others as members.
In 1997, the Fugees split to work on solo projects, which Jean later blamed on his tumultuous relationship with Hill, and the fact he married his wife Claudinette while still involved with her. In the summer of 1996, Hill had met Rohan Marley, a son of the late reggae legend Bob Marley and a former University of Miami football player. Hill subsequently began a relationship with him, while still also involved with Jean. Hill became pregnant, and in August 1997, Marley and Hill's first child, Zion David, was born. The couple lived in Hill's childhood house in South Orange after she bought her parents a new house down the street.
In November 1998, Marley and Hill's second child, Selah Louise, was born. Of being a young mother of two, Hill said, "It's not an easy situation at all. You have to really pray and be honest with yourself."
During 2000, Hill dropped out of the public eye. The pressures of fame began to overwhelm her. She disliked not being able to go out of her house to do simple errands without having to worry about her physical appearance.She fired her management team and began attending Bible study classes five days a week; she also stopped doing interviews, watching television and listening to music. She started associating with a "spiritual advisor" named Brother Anthony.Some familiar with Hill believe Anthony more resembled a cult leader than a spiritual advisor,and thought his guidance probably inspired much of Hill's more controversial public behavior.
She later described this period of her life to Essence saying "People need to understand that the Lauryn Hill they were exposed to in the beginning was all that was allowed in that arena at that time… I had to step away when I realized that for the sake of the machine, I was being way too compromised. I felt uncomfortable about having to smile in someone's face when I really didn't like them or even know them well enough to like them." She also spoke about her emotional crisis, saying, "For two or three years I was away from all social interaction. It was a very introspective time because I had to confront my fears and master every demonic thought about inferiority, about insecurity or the fear of being black, young and gifted in this western culture." She went on to say that she had to fight to retain her identity, and was forced "to deal with folks who weren't happy about that."
Around 2001, Marley and Hill's third child, Joshua Omaru, was born. He was followed a year later by their fourth, John Nesta. While Hill sometimes had spoken of Marley as her husband, they never married, and along the way she was informed that Marley had been previously married at a young age. Furthermore, according to a 2003 Rolling Stone report, he had never secured a divorce; but Marley later disputed this and made public to a blog a 1996 divorce document from Haiti. The two had been living in a high-end Miami hotel, but around 2003 she moved out into her own place in that city. Hill later said that she and Marley "have had long periods of separation over the years".
In early 2008, Marley and Hill's fifth child, Sarah, was born. The couple was not living together, although Marley considered them "spiritually together" even while listing himself as single on social media. Hill later said that she and Marley "have [had] a long and complex history about which many inaccuracies have been reported since the beginning" and that they both valued their privacy. By August 2008, Hill was living with her mother and children in her hometown of South Orange, New Jersey.
Reports in mid-2008 claimed that Columbia Records then believed Hill to be on hiatus.
In July 2011, Hill gave birth to her sixth child, Micah, her first not with Rohan Marley; the father remains publicly unknown.
On May 6, 2013, Hill was sentenced by Judge Arleo to serve three months in prison for tax evasion and will face three months house arrest afterwards as part of a year of supervised probation. She had faced a possible sentence of as long as 36 months, and the sentence given took into account her lack of a prior criminal record and her six minor-aged children. By this point Hill had fully paid back $970,000 in back taxes and penalties she owed, which also took into account an additional $500,000 that Hill had in unreported income for 2008 and 2009. In the courtroom, Hill said that she had lived "very modestly" considering how much money she had made for others, and that "I am a child of former slaves who had a system imposed on them. I had an economic system imposed on me." Hill reported to the minimum-security Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury on July 8, 2013, to begin serving her sentence.
Hill was released from prison on October 4, 2013, a few days early for good behavior, and began her home confinement and probationary periods.She put out a single called "Consumerism" that she had finished, via verbal and e-mailed instructions, while incarcerated. Judge Arleo allowed her to postpone part of her confinement in order to tour in late 2013 under strict conditions.
