Felicia Pearson, star of the acclaimed TV series The Wire, reveals her incredible, hard-knock life story, one that dramatically parallels her tv character

While Felicia Pearson is a brilliant actor in a truly chilling role, what's most remarkable about 'Snoop' is what she has overcome in real life. Born a three-pound, cross-eyed crack baby in East Baltimore and raised in a foster home, Snoop proved she was as tough as the streets. Showing an early aptitude for drug slinging and violence, she thrived as a baby gangsta until she landed in Jessup State Penitentiary after killing a woman in self-defence. There she rebelled violently against the system and it would take the news of the murder of her childhood mentor, a local drug-dealer called Uncle Loney, for her to decide to turn her life around. Then, after being discovered in a nightclub by one of The Wire's cast members and recruited to the show, fiction began to mirror life as 'snoop', drawing on the tribulations of her past, created one of television's most frightening and intriguing villains