Jamie Foxx was born December 13, 1967 in Terrell, Texas. His orginal name was Eric Bishop. When his parents marriage failed, his grandparents, Mark and Esther Talley, stepped in and at age 7 months adopted him. 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 in 1994, "Peep This" and sings the theme song for his 1999 movie, "Any Given Sunday". However, in 1989 his life changed when a girl firend 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 got preference for mike time on open stage nights. That led to his being cast in "Roc" and "In Living Color" and ultimately to his own Fox network tv series.
By the mid-1990s, stand-up comic Jamie Foxx had begun to parlay his work in comedy clubs and on the TV sketch comedy "In Living Color" into a feature film career. Foxx had begun performing in comedy clubs soon after reaching Los Angeles in 1989. Within the next few years, he appeared on stage at The Comedy Store and The Improv, and at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem. He won the 1991 Oakland (California) Comedy Competition. That same year, Foxx joined the cast of Fox's variety show "In Living Color" as one of the sketch players, creating Wanda, one of the ugliest women in the world. In 1992, Foxx won his first feature role, a supporting part to Robin Williams, in "Toys". In 1996, he had supporting roles in two features, the uneven comedy "The Great White Hype", as a boxer's manager, and "The Truth About Cats and Dogs" (1996), as Ben Chaplin's friend trying to make sense of the confusion.
Foxx has continued to perform comedy on TV. He was a guest on "Paul Rodriguez: Crossing Gang Lines", a 1991 Fox special, and has appeared on HBO's "Def Comedy Jam". In 1993, he starred in the one-man concert special, "Jamie Foxx: Straight From the Foxxhole" (HBO) and three years later was back in his own sitcom, "The Jamie Foxx Show" (The WB, 1996-2001). In the latter, he played an ambitious actor who goes to work for relatives at a somewhat run-down hotel. He's also starred in films such as Booty Call (1997), Any Given Sunday (1999), Date from Hell (2000) and Ali (2001).
