Name at birth: Inga Marchand

Rapper Foxy Brown took her stage name from the sassy title character of the 1974 Blaxploitation film starring Pam Grier. Browns supporting rap on Jay-Zs hit Aint No Nigga put her on the map, and her 1996 album Ill Na Na (recorded when she was 16) sold over a million copies. Chyna Doll (1999) featured raps with Jay-Z and DMX and made #1 on the Billboard charts. Browns in-your-face sexuality and revealing outfits added to her popularity and earned her comparisons with another Brooklyn rapper, Lil Kim. She also joined rappers Nature, Nas and AZ in the supergroup The Firm and had a cameo role in the 1998 film Woo. Her music career has taken a back seat to her criminal career since a 2004 arrest for a violent outburst in a beauty salon. After repeatedly violating the terms of her probation in various altercations, Foxy Brown was sentenced in September of 2007 to a year in jail, just two months after releasing her single We Dont Surrender.

Foxy Brown’s brother is the rapper Young Gavin… She has modelled in ads for Calvin Klein… In late 2005, Foxy Brown announced that she had suffered complete hearing loss earlier in the year and was undergoing treatment that included surgery… Being tossed in the Rikers Island pokey didn’t mean the end of headlines — Foxy Brown was back in the news in October of 2007, sentenced to 76 days of solitary confinement (“punitive segregation”) for in-prison violations.