Jamie Foxx

Biography

Jamie Foxx is an American actor, singer, and comedian. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor, BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, for his work in the biographical film Ray (2004).

 The same year, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the action film Collateral (2004). 

Other prominent acting roles include the title role in the film Django Unchained (2012), the supervillain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and William Stacks in the modern version of Annie (2014).

Jamie Foxx was born Eric Marlon Bishop in Terrell, Texas, to Louise Annette Talley and Darrell Bishop, who worked as a stockbroker and later changed his name to Shahid Abdula. His mother was an adopted child. 

When her marriage to his father failed, his maternal grandparents, Mark and Estelle Talley, stepped in and, at age seven months, adopted Jamie too. He has said that he had a very rigid upbringing that placed him in the Boy Scouts and the church choir. 

During high school, he played quarterback for his high school team and was good enough that he got press in Dallas newspapers. He studied music in college. He released a music album, "Peep This" (1994), and sang the theme song for his movie, Any Given Sunday (1999).

 However, in 1989, his life changed when a girlfriend challenged him to get up onstage at the Comedy Club. In fact, he says he took his androgynous stage name because he learned that women have a preference for mike time on open stage nights. That led to his being cast on Roc (1991) and In Living Color (1990).

Foxx had his own WB television show from 1996 to 2001, the sitcom The Jamie Foxx Show (1996), in which he played Jamie King Jr. Foxx is also a Grammy Award-winning musician, producing four albums that have charted highly on the US Billboard 200: "Unpredictable" (2005), which topped the chart, "Intuition" (2008), "Best Night of My Life" (2010), and "Hollywood: A Story of a Dozen Roses" (2015).

 In 2012, Foxx starred in the title role of the Quentin Tarantino-written and directed Django Unchained (2012). Foxx starred alongside his Ray co-star Kerry Washington, as well as Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Samuel L. Jackson.

 In 2013, Foxx was cast as President James Sawyer in White House Down (2013) alongside Channing Tatum. The following year, Foxx appeared as the villain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and co-starred with Quvenzhané Wallis in Annie (2014), Sony's Will Smith and Jay-Z produced an update of the comic strip-turned-musical.

He has two children, including Corinne Foxx, (born 1994), who resides with her mother.