Cinema Experts

“I've been around horses, but I certainly wouldn't call myself a horseman by any means. It's a combination of being very aware of them, and not trusting them.”
Cooper was born in Kansas City, Missouri to Mary Ann, a homemaker, and Charles Cooper, who served as a doctor in the United States Air Force and operated a cattle ranch. He has an older brother, Chuck, and grew up as a "blue-collar cowpoke" in Houston, Texas and Kansas City. Cooper attended Stephens College and the University of Missouri–Columbia, where he dual majored in the school of agriculture and the school of drama. After graduation, Cooper moved to New York City to pursue his career.
Cooper's early performances include Matewan, the 1987 picture by John Sayles, and the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove. Some of his standout performances include Money Train as a psychotic pyromaniac who terrifies toll booth operators, Lone Star in a rare leading role as a Texas sheriff charged with solving a decades old case, and American Beauty as a homophobic Colonel of the United States Marine Corps. While many felt that Cooper should have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in that film, he eventually won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 2003 for playing the role of John Laroche in Adaptation. Cooper also appeared in The Bourne Identity in 2001 as a ruthless CIA special ops director, a role he reprised (in flashbacks) in The Bourne Supremacy.
Cooper was busy in 2005, having appeared in three well-received and acclaimed films: Jarhead (reuniting him with American Beauty director Sam Mendes and October Sky actor Jake Gyllenhaal), Capote and Syriana. His most recent role is in the thriller Breach, playing real-life FBI operative and spy Robert Hanssen; Cooper has said that he believes Breach is the "first studio film where they've considered me the lead" actor.
Cooper will next appear as a government agent in dangerous territory alongside Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman in the action thriller The Kingdom.

“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.

"The truth is most of the films that make a lot of money no one remembers, and I'm not interested in making films that no one remembers."
During childhood, Gyllenhaal had regular exposure to filmmaking due to his family's deep ties to the industry. As an 11-year-old he made his acting debut as Billy Crystal's son in the 1991 comedy film City Slickers. Gyllenhaal appeared in the 1993 film A Dangerous Woman (along with sister Maggie), in a 1994 episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, and in the 1998 comedy Homegrown. Along with their mother, Jake and Maggie appeared in two episodes of Molto Mario, an Italian cooking show on the Food Network.
Gyllenhaal's first lead role was in October Sky, Joe Johnston's 1999 adaptation of the Homer Hickam autobiography Rocket Boys, in which he portrayed a young man from West Virginia striving to win a science scholarship to avoid becoming a coal miner. The film earned $32 million and was described in the Sacramento News and Review as Gyllenhaal's "breakout performance."
Donnie Darko, Gyllenhaal's second major film, was not a box office success upon its initial 2001 release, but eventually became a cult favorite. The film, directed by Richard Kelly, is set in 1988 and stars Gyllenhaal as a troubled teenager who, after narrowly escaping death, experiences visions of a 6 foot (1.8 m) tall rabbit named Frank who tells him that the world is coming to an end. Gyllenhaal's performance was well-received by critics; Dan Kois of Salon.com claimed that "Gyllenhaal manages the difficult trick of seeming both blandly normal and profoundly disturbed, often within the same scene".
After the critical success of Donnie Darko, Gyllenhaal's next role was as the lead character in 2002's Highway, a film ignored by audiences and critics alike. His performance was described by one critic as "silly, cliched and straight to video".
Gyllenhaal had more success starring opposite Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl, which premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival; he also starred in Lovely & Amazing with Catherine Keener. In both films he plays an unstable character who begins a reckless affair with an older woman. Gyllenhaal later described these as "teenager in transition" roles. Gyllenhaal later starred in the Touchstone Pictures romantic comedy Bubble Boy, which was loosely based on the story of David Vetter. The film portrays the title character's adventures as he pursues the love of his life before she marries the wrong man. The film was panned by critics, with one calling it an "empty-headed, chaotic, utterly tasteless atrocity".
Following Bubble Boy, Gyllenhaal starred opposite Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon in Moonlight Mile, as a young man coping with the death of his fiancée and the grief of her parents. The story, which received mixed reviews, is loosely based on writer/director Brad Silberling's personal experiences following the murder of girlfriend Rebecca Schaeffer.
Gyllenhaal was almost cast as Spider-Man for Spider-Man 2 due to director Sam Raimi's concerns that Tobey Maguire, who had a back injury, risked paralysis from the stuntwork the movie required. Maguire recovered, however, and the sequel was shot without Gyllenhaal.
Instead, Gyllenhaal starred in the blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow in 2004, co-starring Dennis Quaid as his father.
In his theatrical debut Gyllenhaal starred on the London stage in Kenneth Lonergan's revival of This is Our Youth. Gyllenhaal said, "Every actor I look up to has done theatre work, so I knew I had to give it a try." The play, which had been a critical sensation on Broadway, ran for eight weeks in London's West End. Gyllenhaal received favorable critical reviews and an Evening Standard Theatre Award in the category "Outstanding Newcomer".
2005 was a prolific year for Gyllenhaal, who starred in the critically praised films Proof, Jarhead, and Brokeback Mountain. In Proof, featuring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins, Gyllenhaal played a graduate student in mathematics who tries to convince Paltrow's character to publish a revolutionary proof to a problem puzzling the mathematicians' community. In Jarhead, Gyllenhaal played against his usual "sensitive yet disturbed" type by displaying an aggressive masculinity as a violent U.S. Marine during the first Gulf War. Public reaction to this film was muted due to Gyllenhaal's simultaneous appearance in Brokeback Mountain.
In Brokeback Mountain, Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger play two sheep herders who, after overcoming initial reluctance, have a homosexual relationship during the 1960s and 1970s. The film was often referred to in the media with the shorthand phrase "the gay cowboy movie". The film won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival. The film went on to win four Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards, and three Academy Awards. Gyllenhaal was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Supporting Actor for his performance, but lost to George Clooney for Syriana. Gyllenhaal also won the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA for the same role and received a Best Supporting Actor nomination and Best Film Ensemble nomination from the Screen Actors Guild. Shortly after the 2006 Academy Awards, Gyllenhaal was invited to join the Academy in recognition of his acting career. Most recently, Gyllenhaal was awarded the 2006 Young Artist Award for Artistic Excellence by The Americans for the Arts National Arts Awards for his role.