Bio
Crystal Fox (sometimes credited as Crystal R. Fox) is an American actress best known for her starring role as Luann Corbin in the police procedural television series In the Heat of the Night, from 1989-1995.
She also has a starring role as Hanna Young, Benny and Candace's mother and the Cryer's maid who raised her two children as a single mother and is very soulful, religious, grandmotherly, persevering and compassionate, in the primetime soap opera The Haves and the Have Nots.
Fox, born New Year's Day in Tryon, North Carolina, began dance classes at 8 years old in Detroit, Michigan. She began her professional acting career as a teen in Atlanta, a place she has considered home since the late '70s.
The niece of the legendary Nina Simone is most noted for her role as Sgt. Luann Corbin on the long-running television series In the Heat of the Night.
Though theatre is her first love, the singer, dancer and actress has many TV and film credits, including Driving Miss Daisy, The Old Settler with Phylicia Rashad, Mama Flora's Family with Cicely Tyson, Separate But Equal with Sidney Poitier, Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored, House of Payne, Law & Order and The Sopranos.
Her theatre credits include Everybody's Ruby, with Viola Davis, at the Public Theater in New York; Gem of the Ocean, directed by Phylicia Rashad, at Seattle Repertory Theatre; For Colored Girls, starring Nicole Ari Parker and Robin Givens, at True Colors Theater Company in Atlanta; The Amen Corner at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; Two Trains Running, directed by Lou Bellamy, at the Penumbra Theatre in Saint Paul, Minnesota; and Fences, directed by Kenny Leon, at the Huntington Theatre in Boston.
Her performance in Fences earned her both a 2009 Independent Reviewers of New England Award and a 2010 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress, Large Company.
The veteran actress also completed a starring role in Pearl Cleage's world premiere of What I Learned in Paris, directed by Susan Booth, at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre, her home theatre of many years. The show broke ticket sales records.
Crystal also completed two successful seasons at the illustrious Oregon Shakespeare Festival.