
Jamie Foxx
Jamie Foxx is a talented R&B artist who is more widely known for his acting. He is one of only four people to have won an Academy Award for acting while also achieving a No 1 album.
Jamie Foxx was born Eric Marlon Bishop on December 13, 1967 in Terrell, Texas. He's the son of Darrell Bishop and Louise Annette Talley Dixon, but was adopted and raised by his mother's adoptive parents, Estelle Marie and Mark Talley.
Music was a big part of Jamie Foxx's life from a young age, as he started playing piano at five years old, and served as the pianist and choir leader for Terrell's New Hope Baptist Church. While in high school, he was the singer for a band Leather and Lace, and attended United States International University where he studied musical and performing arts.
He adopted the name Jamie Foxx when trying to become a stand-up comedian. He found that open mic nights often had women go first, so he changed his name to a more ambiguous name to get more opportunities. Foxx was based on the comedian Redd Foxx.
His comedy explorations landed him a role on In Living Color in 1991. While a member of the cast, he began to see opportunities in music. He put out an album in 1994 called Peep This. The album received mixed to negative receptions and didn't sell well, stalling out his musical career while his acting career began to boom.
Acting became the big focus of Jamie Foxx's career during this time as he went from opportunity to opportunity. His show, The Jamie Foxx Show ran from 1996 to 2001. In 1999 he started getting bigger and bigger movie roles as he had a part in Any Given Sunday and then Ali in 2001.
2003-2004 saw the major explosion in Foxx's career on every front. He appeared in Collateral in 2004 which got him an Academy Award nomination. His role in the biography Ray earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor and served as a strong sign that Foxx could rejuvenates music career.
His music career was also seeing major success then. In 2003, he started doing a number of collaborations that put him on the charts. Twista's "Slow Jams", Kanye West's "Gold Digger" both featured Jamie Foxx and both reached #1 on the US charts.
Running hot on this momentum, he released his second album, Unpredictable, in December 2005. The album was a huge success. It sold 598,000 copies its first week and reached #1 on the charts in its second week when it sold 200,000 more copies. It went double platinum in the US.
He continued to pursue music during this time, releasing a third album, Intuition, in 2008. The album featured collaborations with a number of rappers including Kanye West, T.I., Lil' Kim and T-Pain. The album's single Blame It was a top 5 hit on the Hot 100 and topped the R&B charts.
His fourth album, Best Night of My Life, came out on December 21, 2010. The album included the singles "Winner", "Living Better Now" and "Fall for Your Type."
His most recent album, Hollywood: A Story of a Dozen Roses came out on May 15, 2015. The album had collaborations with Chris Brown, Fabolous, Pharrell and Kid Ink. It debuted at number 10 and sold 31,000 copies in its first week. The album was described as being inspired by a breakup Jamie Foxx had in Hollywood, California.
Throughout, Foxx has continued to star in numerous high profile Hollywood films including Pixar's Soul, Baby Driver, The Amazing Spiderman 2 and Just Mercy. He also hosts a competition TV show Beat Shazam.