Biography

Angélique Kidjo was born on July 14, 1960 in Ouidah, Benin. She is a music artist and actress, known for The Woman King (2022), The CEO (2016) and Street Fighter (1994). She has been married to Jean Hebrail since 1983. They have one child.

Speaks five languages fluently: Fon, French, Yoruba, Gen (Mina), and English.

She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 7011 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on August 18, 2026. Walk of Fame inductee Willem Dafoe, and record producer and songwriter Harvey Mason Jr. were guest speakers at the ceremony. Her Walk of Fame star is located across the street from the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

I come from this diversity and richness that's Benin, where there are fifty different languages. I speak four of them. I never know in advance which language will come when I start to write.The song leads me to the language.

Benin has little tradition of harmony in the south where I come from. The north has a lot more, but the south has more rhythms, which are absolutely fantastic and people don't know them. There's one village specifically dedicated to the drum. When you get there you can go and choose your tree, cut it down and make your percussion from it. The challenge for me is adding the harmonies that the rhythms give.

People say 'la musique africaine', but I say 'les musiques africaines'. They refuse to recognize that Africa is a continent with a huge number of different cultures and languages and music. That's always been the difficulty of my career. People expect all Africans to have the same sound more or less, as if you can lump them all together.