Lauryn Noelle Hill was born on May 26, 1975, in East Orange, New Jersey.^[5][6] Her mother, Valerie Hill, was an English teacher and her father, Mal Hill, a computer and management consultant. She has one older brother named Malaney who was born in 1972.^[7][8][9] Her Baptist family moved to New York for a short period before settling in South Orange.^[6][10]

Hill has said of her musically oriented family: "there were so many records, so much music constantly being played. My mother played the piano, my father sang, and we were always surrounded by music."^[6] Her father sang in local nightclubs and at weddings.^[11][12] While growing up, Hill frequently listened to Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and Gladys Knight;^[13] years later she recalled playing Marvin Gaye's What's Going On repeatedly until she fell asleep to it.^[6]

In middle school, Hill performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" before a basketball game. Due to its popularity, subsequent games featured a recording of her rendition.^[7] In 1988, Hill appeared as an Amateur Night contestant on It's Showtime at the Apollo. She sang her version of the Smokey Robinson track "Who's Lovin' You", garnering an initially harsh reaction from the crowd. She persevered through the performance.^[14]

Hill attended Columbia High School, where she was a member of the track team, cheerleading squad^[7][8] and was a classmate of actor Zach Braff.^[15] She also took violin lessons, went to dance class, and founded the school's gospel choir.^[12] Academically, she took advanced placement classes and received primarily 'A' grades.^[8][12] School officials recognized her as a leader among the student body.^[12] Later recalling her education, Hill commented, "I had a love for—I don't know if it was necessarily for academics, more than it just was for achieving, period. If it was academics, if it was sports, if it was music, if it was dance, whatever it was, I was always driven to do a lot in whatever field or whatever area I was focusing on at the moment."^[6]

While a freshman in high school,^[9] through mutual friends, Prakazrel "Pras" Michelapproached Hill about a music group he was creating.^[13][16] Hill and Pras began under the name Translator Crew. They came up with this name because they wanted to rhyme in different languages.^[13] Another female vocalist was soon replaced by Michel's cousin, multi-instrumentalist Wyclef Jean.^[13] The group began performing in local showcases and high school talent shows.^[9]Hill was initially only a singer, but then learned to rap too; instead of modeling herself on female rappers like Salt-N-Pepa and MC Lyte, she preferred male rappers like Ice Cube and developed her flow from listening to them.^[11] Hill later said, "I remember doing my homework in the bathroom stalls of hip-hop clubs."^[17]

While growing up, Hill took acting lessons in Manhattan.^[12] She began her acting career in 1991 appearing with Jean in Club XII, MC Lyte's Off-Broadway hip-hop rendering of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.^[9] While the play was not a success, an agent noticed her. Later that year, Hill began appearing on the soap opera As the World Turns in a recurring role as troubled teenager Kira Johnson.^[7][17] She subsequently co-starred alongside Whoopi Goldberg in the 1993 release Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, playing Rita Louise Watson, an inner-city Catholic school teenager with a surly, rebellious attitude.^[7][9] In it, she performed the songs "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" (a duet with Tanya Blount) and "Joyful, Joyful".^[18]

Director Bill Duke credited Hill with improvising a rap in a scene: "None of that was scripted. That was all Lauryn. She was amazing."^[7] Critic Roger Ebert called her "the girl with the big joyful voice", although he thought her talent was wasted,^[19]while Rolling Stone said she "performed marvelously against type ... in the otherwise perfunctory [film]".^[9] Hill also appeared in Steven Soderbergh's 1993 motion picture King of the Hill, in a minor but pivotal role as a 1930s gum-popping elevator operator. Soderbergh biographer Jason Wood described her as supplying one of the warmest scenes in the film.^[20] Hill graduated from Columbia High School in 1993.

Pras, Hill and Jean renamed their group Fugees, a derivative of the word "refugee", which was a derogatory term for Haitian Americans.^[9] Hill began a romantic relationship with Jean.^[16] The Fugees, who signed a contract with Columbia/Ruffhouse Records in 1993,^[17] became known for their genre blending, particularly of reggae, rock and soul,^[13] which was first experimented on their debut album, Blunted on Reality, released in 1994. It reached No. 62 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart^[21] but overall sold poorly^[7][17] and was met by poor critical reviews due to their management's insistence they adopt gangsta rap attitudes.^[9]Although the album made little impact, Hill's rapping on "Some Seek Stardom" was seen as a highlight.^[22] Within the group, she was frequently referred to by the nickname "L. Boogie".^[23] Hill's image and artistry, as well as her full, rich, raspy alto voice, placed her at the forefront of the band, with some fans urging her to begin a solo career.^[9][22]

The Fugees' second album, The Score (1996), peaked at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200^[24] and stayed in the top ten of that chart for over half a year.^[9] It sold about seven million copies in the United States^[25] and more than 20 million copies worldwide.^[26] In the 1996 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, The Score came second in the list of best albums and three of its tracks placed within the top 20 best singles.^[27] It won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album,^[28] and was later included on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.^[29] The Score garnered praise for being a strong alternative to the gangsta idiom, and Hill stated, "We're trying to do something positive with the music because it seems like only the negative is rising to the top these days. It only takes a drop of purity to clean a cesspool."^[11]

Singles from The Score included "Fu-Gee-La" and "Ready or Not", which highlighted Hill's singing and rapping abilities,^[30] and the Bob Marley cover "No Woman, No Cry". Her rendition of "Killing Me Softly" became the group's breakout hit.^[31]Buttressed by what Rolling Stone publications later called Hill's "evocative" vocal line^[13] and her "amazing pipes",^[29] the track became pervasive on pop, R&B, hip hop, and adult contemporaryradio formats.^[13] It won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.^[28][32] On the album, Hill combined African-American music and Caribbean musicinfluences with socially conscious lyrics.^[30]Newsweek mentioned Hill's "irresistibly cute looks" and proclaimed her "the most powerful new voice in rap".^[11]

When she was 21 years old, Hill was still living at home with her parents.^[9] She had been enrolled at Columbia University during this period, and considered majoring in history as she became a sophomore,^[9][11] but left after about a year of total studies once sales of The Score went into the millions.^[7] In 1996, she responded to a false rumor on The Howard Stern Show that she had made a racist comment on MTV, saying "How can I possibly be a racist? My music is universal. And I believe in God. If I believe in God, then I have to love all of God's creations. There can be no segregation."^[17][33]

In 1996, Hill founded the Refugee Project, a non-profit outreach organization that sought to transform the attitudes and behavior of at-risk urban youth.^[34] Part of this was Camp Hill, which offered stays in the Catskill Mountains for such youngsters; another was production of an annual Halloween haunted house in East Orange.^[34] Hill also raised money for Haitian refugees, supported clean water well-building projects in Kenya and Uganda, and staged a rap concert in Harlem to promote voter registration. A 1997 benefit event for the Refugee Project introduced a board of trustees for the organization that included Sean Combs, Mariah Carey, Busta Rhymes, Spike Lee, and others as members.^[35]

In 1997, the Fugees split to work on solo projects,^[36] which Jean later blamed on his tumultuous relationship with Hill and the fact he married his wife Claudinette while still involved with Hill.^[36][37] Meanwhile, in the summer of 1996 Hill had met Rohan Marley, a son of Bob Marley and a former University of Miami football player.^[14] Hill subsequently began a relationship with him, while still also involved with Jean.^[14] Hill became pregnant in late 1996, and on August 3, 1997, Marley and Hill's first child, Zion David, was born.^[10] The couple lived in Hill's childhood house in South Orange after she bought her parents a new house down the street.^[17]

Hill had a cameo appearance in the 1997 film Hav Plenty. In 1998, Hill took up another small, but important role in the film Restaurant;^[38]Entertainment Weekly praised her portrayal of the protagonist's pregnant former girlfriend as bringing vigor to the film.^[39]

Hill recorded her solo record The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill from late 1997 through June 1998 at Tuff Gong Studios in Jamaica.^[5][33] The title was inspired by the book The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) by Carter G. Woodson and The Education of Sonny Carson, a film and autobiographical novel.^[40] The album featured contributions from D'Angelo, Carlos Santana, Mary J. Blige and the then-unknown John Legend.^[41] Wyclef Jean initially did not support Hill recording a solo album, but eventually offered his production help; Hill turned him down.^[14]

Several songs on the album concerned her frustration with the Fugees; "I Used to Love Him" dealt with the breakdown of the relationship between Hill and Wyclef Jean.^[40] Other songs such as "To Zion" spoke about her decision to have her first baby (Zion David Marley, the first of five she was to have with Rohan Marley), even though some at the time encouraged her to have an abortion so to not interfere with her blossoming career.^[17][40][42] Indeed, Hill's pregnancy revived her from a period of writer's block.^[33]

In terms of production, Hill collaborated with a group of musicians known as New Ark, consisting of Vada Nobles, Rasheem Pugh, Tejumold Newton, and Johari Newton.^[40] Hill later said that she wanted to "write songs that lyrically move me and have the integrity of reggae and the knock of hip-hop and the instrumentation of classic soul" and that the production on the album was intended to make the music sound raw and not computer-aided.^[40] Hill spoke of pressure from her label to emulate Prince, wherein all tracks would be credited as written and produced by the artist with little outside help.^[40] She also wanted to be appreciated as an auteur as much as Jean had within the Fugees.^[14] She also saw a feminist cause: "But step out and try and control things and there are doubts. This is a very sexist industry. They'll never throw the 'genius' title to a sister."^[30] While recording the album, when Hill was asked about providing contracts or documentation to the musicians, she replied, "We all love each other. This ain't about documents. This is blessed."^[14]