Crystal 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. She 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 theater 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 actor most recently 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 theater of many years. The show broke ticket sales records.

Crystal has also completed two successful seasons at the illustrious Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Crystal is honored and humbled to play her newest role as the powerful but extremely human Hanna in Tyler Perry's "The Haves and the Have Nots." Striving to shed light on the varying beauty and pain of living a life challenged by seeming limitations but overflowing in faith, she hopes to do working-class matriarchs—and the community as a whole—proud.