Jamie Foxx

Born in Terrell, a small Texan town, four decades ago, Eric Marlon Bishop was fostered at seven months, after the dramatic divorce of his parents, by his grandparents. They enrolled him in piano lessons when he was three years old, which marked the beginning of his passion for music, which continued when he joined the church choir. In high school he was successful on the football team, while planning to become a renowned concert pianist. He studied music at the University of San Diego and at the Julliard School in New York. His life turned upside down when he went out with a girl who challenged him to go on stage at a venue dedicated to comedy, which he had dedicated that night to fans who wanted to show off his skills. He discovered that he easily caused laughter among the attendees, which made him decide to become a comedian. From that moment on he performed in venues, writing his own jokes himself. He invented the stage name with which he has risen to stardom, combining the last name of his favorite African-American comedian,Redd Foxx , with the name Jamie, which he apparently liked because it can look feminine too. “In comedy venues, it’s usually the women who perform first and the men second, so calling me Jamie worked to my advantage because I was getting much higher up the bills,” Foxx explains. His talent for laughing was not lost on the television executives who cast him on the series In Living Color and later gave him his own show: The Jamie Foxx Show .

The actor made his film debut with a small role in Barry Levinson ‘s Toys , and then spent a few years pigeonholed in the comic genre, with supporting roles in such irregular productions as The Truth About Cats and Dogs , Booty Call. Sex yes… but safe and Kidnapping by accident . The big turning point in his career came when Oliver Stone decided to trust his dramatic possibilities, offering him the role of an egocentric American football player, in Any Given Sunday . They began to offer him more complex and extensive roles, such as the protagonist of Bait , a thriller ofAntoine Fuqua . Especially memorable was his work as Bundini Brown, the buddy who encouraged Will Smith , turned into Cassius Clay, into Ali , to whom he yelled some memorable phrases from the corner: “Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands cannot strike what his eyes cannot see…”. The film’s director, Michael Mann , was so happy with his work that he has become his fetish actor, since he once again trusted his good work to play Max, the taxi driver who discovers that his passenger is a hired killer ( Tom Cruise ), in Collateral. His work as an ordinary man forced by circumstances to become a hero was so memorable that it earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting role, although that same year Foxx himself had all the ballots to win him in the category of best leading actor for Ray . . The miraculous characterization of him as the famed blind musician left no one in any doubt as to who would walk away with the statuette that year. And that was not exactly competing with fans, but with the very same Don Cheadle ( Hotel Rwanda ), Johnny Depp ( Finding Neverland ), Leonardo DiCaprio ( The Aviator ) and Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby ).

But Jamie Foxx is not only successful in the cinema. His album De él Unpredictable was located two weeks after its release as number one among the best sellers. Only four other Oscar-winning actors have topped the music charts: Barbra Streisand , Cher, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby .

The actor never married, although he has a daughter, Corina, from an old relationship, who lives with her mother. He has also failed at times in the cinema, with Stealth: The Invisible Menace , which almost nobody saw, and Jarhead , the most disappointing film by Sam Mendes . He also did not raise great passions in Miami Vice , again under the orders of Michael Mann, producer of The Shadow of the Kingdom , who recruited him to play an FBI agent.

Currently Foxx has resumed his classical music studies, learning to play the cello and violin for The Soloist , in which he has to play a real character, a schizophrenic who plays in the middle of the street and turns out to be a virtuoso. He misses resuming his humorous side. “My agent and my administrator prefer that I go on a musical tour and they warn me that it is very risky, because I am going to ruin everything I have built as a dramatic actor. But I like to write humorous gags and I need to show people something different,” Foxx explains.