Jamie Foxx

Jamie Foxx is an American actor, comedian, and singer-songwriter whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining American film roles — particularly his 2005 Best Actor Academy Award win for Taylor Hackford's Ray. He was born Eric Marlon Bishop on December 13, 1967, in Terrell, Texas. His biological father Darrell Bishop (later Shahid Abdula) was a Muslim African-American stockbroker, and his biological mother Louise Annette Talley was a 16-year-old African-American teenager who gave him up for adoption to her adoptive parents Esther Marie and Mark Talley when he was seven months old. He was raised by his maternal grandmother Estelle Marie Talley (whose surname he took) in Terrell, Texas.

His education at the United States International University (San Diego) on a piano scholarship (1986–1989; without earning a degree) launched his early-career path. His 1989 stand-up-comedy career launch at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles — under the stage name Jamie Foxx (which he adopted to avoid the gender-bias of female-dominated late-1980s open-mic comedy nights, after being told that more women were being booked than men) — produced his early-career American stand-up-comedy public profile.

His 1991–1994 cast-member tenure on Fox's African-American sketch-comedy TV series In Living Color (created by Keenen Ivory Wayans, alongside Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, and David Alan Grier) launched his mid-1990s American TV-comedy public profile. His subsequent 1996–2001 lead role as Jamie King on the WB sitcom TV series The Jamie Foxx Show produced his late-1990s American TV-sitcom public profile.

His 2004 lead role as Ray Charles in Taylor Hackford's Ray — for which Foxx learned to play the piano and mimicked Ray Charles's mannerisms across the entire film — won him the 2005 Best Actor Academy Award. His parallel R&B-music career has produced multiple American Billboard Hot 100 hits — particularly his 2005 single "Gold Digger" (with Kanye West, which was his first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single) and his 2008 album Intuition. His subsequent film career has produced Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014, in which he played the villain Electro), and Jeff Fowler's Soul (2020, the Pixar animated film for which he voiced Joe Gardner). He has one daughter (American actress Corinne Foxx, born 1994).

His name Jamie began as a personally-adopted stage name (the unisex diminutive of James, from the Hebrew Ya'akov). Jamie has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' and girls' names since the 1970s.