QUEEN LATIFAH has publicly thanked OPRAH WINFREY for helping her to quit smoking.
The CHICAGO star, a self-confessed "avid watcher" of Winfrey's daily talk show, was so distressed when guest DR MEHMET OZ showed the damage caused to smokers' organs at the beginning of 2004, she promised herself she'd get serious about quitting.
Latifah, real name DANA OWENS, recalls, "He brought all these organs and I was struggling to quit smoking around this time, really mentally struggling with it, physically struggling with it.
"I was up to, like, a pack-and-a-half a day, sometimes two packs a day.
"He (Oz) showed a healthy lung and then he showed a lung that had lung cancer. It definitely was frightening to me; it was from then on that I really knew I had to figure out some way to put the pack down.
"Half of it was to make my mother proud, to be able to have a child, to kind of feel proud of myself. I hope to never smoke again. I like myself as a non-smoker. That episode of Oprah may have, quite possibly, saved my life." The rapper/movie star checked into anti-smoking hiking bootcamp facility, called The Ashram, and spent three weeks fighting her habit with healthy country walks.