Personal Life

Actress Vivica Anjanetta Fox was born on July 30, 1964, in South Bend, Indiana. Her mother, Everlyena Fox, worked as a pharmaceutical technician, and her father, William Fox, was a school administrator. Vivica Fox’s parents divorced when she was 3 years old, and she was raised primarily by her mother. Fox describes herself as a hyperactive child whose favorite pastime was roller-skating. Fox’s teenage years were active ones; she worked at a fast-food restaurant while also playing school sports and singing in the choir, but confessed to being star-struck from an early age. “I always knew I was going to perform. As soon as I finished my homework, I would dig into a magazine and read about show business,” she recalled in People. After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue that performing career, but wisely enrolled in school part-time at Golden West College in Huntington Beach as well. She also worked in a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and one day a customer-who turned out to be a film producer-recommended that she give his agent-friend a call.

Vivica A. Fox, Essence magazine asserted in 1997, was “the Hollywood homegirl of the moment” for the verve she lent to several major releases of the past year. After Independence Day hit theaters in the summer of 1996, fans literally stopped Fox on the street to compliment her performance. Arsenio Hall tapped her as his co-star in an unfortunately short-lived 1997 sitcom bearing his name. In Set It Off, she played a female bank robber opposite several other well-known African American actresses. And as “Ms. B. Haven,” hench-bunny to the evil Mr. Freeze in the 1997 Batman movie, Fox would flex her action-hero talents opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger.