Background and career
Tracy Lauren Marrow (born February 16, 1958), known professionally as Ice-T (or Ice T), is an American rapper and actor. He is active in both hip-hop and heavy metal. Ice-T began his career as an underground rapper in the 1980s and was signed to Sire Records in 1987, when he released his debut album Rhyme Pays. The following year, he founded the record label Rhyme $yndicate Records (named after his collective of fellow hip-hop artists called the "Rhyme $yndicate") and released another album, Power (1988), which is Ice-T's only album to be certified platinum by the RIAA. His next three albums, The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! (1989), O.G. Original Gangster (1991) and Home Invasion (1993), were also critically acclaimed and commercially successful, and were all certified gold in the US. Ice-T co-founded the heavy metal band Body Count in 1990, which he introduced on O.G. Original Gangster, on the track titled "Body Count". The band released its self-titled debut album in 1992.
Ice-T encountered controversy over his track "Cop Killer", the lyrics of which discussed killing police officers. He asked to be released from his contract with Warner Bros. Records, and his follow-up solo album, Home Invasion, was released through Priority Records. Ice-T released two more albums in the late 1990s and one in the 2000s before focusing on both his acting career and Body Count, who have released eight studio albums to date, the latest being 2024's Merciless. As an actor, Ice-T played small parts in the films Breakin' (1984) and its sequels, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo and Rappin' (1984 and 1985 respectively), before his major role debut, starring as police detective Scotty Appleton in New Jack City (1991). He received top billing for his role in Surviving the Game (1994) and continued to appear in small roles in TV series and other films throughout the 1990s.
Since 2000, he has portrayed NYPD detective/sergeant Odafin Tutuola on the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, making him the longest-running male series actor in American TV history, according to Deadline. A reality television show titled Ice Loves Coco ran for three seasons (2011–2013) on E!, featuring the home life of Ice-T and his wife Coco Austin. In 2018, he began hosting the true crime documentary In Ice Cold Blood on the Oxygen cable channel, which ran for three seasons.
Tracy Lauren Marrow, the son of Solomon and Alice Marrow, was born in Newark, New Jersey on February 16, 1958. Solomon's family was originally from Virginia and Philadelphia, and Alice's family was originally from Louisiana. Both of his parents were African American. Ice-T states that his father was a "dark-skinned brother" while his mother was a "fair-skinned" black woman who looked like Dorothy Dandridge or Lena Horne. For decades, Solomon worked as a conveyor belt mechanic at the Rapistan Conveyor Company. When Marrow was a child, his family moved to upscale Summit, New Jersey. The first time race played a major part in Marrow's life was at the age of seven, when he became aware of the racism leveled by his white friends towards black children. Marrow surmised that he escaped similar treatment because they thought that he was white due to his lighter skin. Relaying this incident to his mother, she told him, "Honey, people are stupid"; her advice and this incident taught Marrow to control the way the negativity of others affected him.
How Ice-T makes money
Ice-T began his career as an underground rapper in the 1980s and was signed to Sire Records in 1987, when he released his debut album Rhyme Pays. The following year, he founded the record label Rhyme $yndicate Records (named after his collective of fellow hip-hop artists called the "Rhyme $yndicate") and released another album, Power (1988), which is Ice-T's only album to be certified platinum by the RIAA.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth, in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
