Cinema Experts

“After six hours of being blind, you lose the sense of how a person is physically. It was amazing to hear the little buzzing voices all around you.”
Foxx was born Eric Marlon Bishop in Dallas, Texas, the son of Louise Annette Talley Dixon and Darrell Bishop, who sometimes worked as a stockbroker and changed his name to Shahid Abdula after converting to Islam. Shortly after his birth, Foxx was adopted and raised by his mother's adoptive parents, Esther Marie, a domestic worker and nursery operator, and Mark Talley, a yard worker. He has had little contact with his birth parents, who were not part of his upbringing. Foxx was raised in the black quarter of Terrell, at the time a racially segregated community. He had a strict Baptist upbringing. He has frequently cited his adoptive grandmother's influence on his life. Foxx changed his name while doing stand up once he found out that female comedians were often called first to perform. He felt Jamie Foxx was an ambiguous enough name to disallow any biases. His last name was chosen as a tribute to Redd Foxx.
After a small part on the TV series Roc, Foxx joined the cast of In Living Color in 1991. Here he won over viewers with many unusual characters and impressions, which included: ugly girl Wanda; fictitious boxer Carl "The Tooth" Williams; and The Dirty Dozens champion T-Dog Jenkins. His impersonation of Garrett Morris would eventually find him starring against the former Saturday Night Live cast member in his sitcom, The Jamie Foxx Show.
His first dramatic role came in Oliver Stone's 1999 film Any Given Sunday, where Foxx played a heavy-partying football player. He was cast in the role in part because of his background as a football player. He has since evolved into a respected dramatic actor. Following Any Given Sunday, Foxx was featured as taxi driver Max Durocher in the film Collateral alongside Tom Cruise, for which he received outstanding reviews and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His real standout performance, however, was his portrayal of Ray Charles in the biopic Ray (2004), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Foxx was only the second male, and the first African American, in history to receive two acting Oscar nominations in the same year for two different movies, Collateral and Ray. The only other male actor to achieve this was Al Pacino. In 2005, Foxx was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In 2005-06 Foxx appeared in three more movies: Jarhead, Miami Vice, and Dreamgirls which were hits at the box office and lifted Foxx even higher as a bankable star in Hollywood.
In September 2007, Foxx was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He said, upon receiving the honor, "[it was] One of the most amazing days of my life".
Foxx is also a Grammy-nominated singer and accomplished musician. He started playing piano at a young age, and later took classical piano lessons while attending college. In 1994, Foxx released an album (on the FOX record label) entitled Peep This. In 2001, he hosted the MTV Video Music Awards.
His music career went into a higher gear when, in 2004, he was featured on rapper Twista's song, "Slow Jamz", which also featured Kanye West. The song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart, as well as number three on the UK singles chart. Foxx's second collaboration with Kanye West, "Gold Digger", in which he sang the "I Got a Woman" Ray Charles-influenced hook, went straight to #1 on the Billboard Top 100, and remained there for 10 weeks straight. In 2005, Foxx was featured on the hit single "Georgia" by Atlanta rappers Ludacris and Field Mob. The song sampled Ray Charles' hit "Georgia on My Mind". Unpredictable is Jamie Foxx's second studio release. It sold over 598,000 copies in its first week but reached the U.S. number one spot in its 2nd week.
After debuting in the first week at number two, Unpredictable rose to the top of the Billboard pop album chart, with 2nd-week sales of 200,000 copies in the United States. The album also charted in the UK top 10 album chart, peaking at number nine. It has since been certified Platinum. Foxx became the fourth artist to have won an Academy Award for acting and to have achieved a number-one record album in the US. (The other three to accomplish this feat were Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Barbra Streisand.) At the 2006 BET Awards, Foxx won two awards: Best Duet/ Collaboration with Kanye West for "Gold Digger" and Video of the Year for the same video. Kanye's video tied with Mary J. Blige's (Be Without You) for Video of the year. On December 8, 2006, Foxx also received four Grammy nominations.