Bill Cosby Biography

Bill Cosby (born July 12, 1937) is an American actor, comedian, educator, television producer and philanthropist.

Biography

Bill Cosby was the first African-American man to star in his own television series (I Spy with Robert Culp, in the mid-1960s), and also broke racial boundaries with his stand-up comedy career in the 1960s and 1970s. After I Spy he starred in other series, some of which were successful (such as the long-running cartoon Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids), while others were not. In the mid-1980s, his sitcom The Cosby Show was a runaway hit (rescuing NBC from possible bankruptcy), and notable for being one of the first television programs to star a well-to-do middle-class Black family. During the 1980s, Cosby was among the highest-paid entertainers in the United States.

In recent years his reputation has been affected by his controversial statements regarding the advancement of the Black community and allegations of sexual harassment, but Cosby still remains a much-beloved icon of popular culture.

Bill Cosby was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at Northwest Philadelphia's Germantown Hospital at 3:00 A.M to William Henry Cosby and Anna Pearl Hite. He started going to the Central High School of Philadelphia, but dropped out in the tenth grade and joined the Navy, and completed high school through correspondence courses (GED). He served 4 years in the Navy, achieving the rank of Hospital Corpsman Third Class. During his service, he was stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and played for the Quantico Marine football team and the Naval Hospital Bethesda basketball team. He was discharged in 1961. Later, he won an athletic scholarship to Temple University.

After working as a bartender for several years, he began his career as a stand-up comic, working the "chitlin circuit' for a time before his big break with Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow Right!. Unlike many contemporary Afro-American comedians, Cosby told stories rather than jokes, often surrounding his Philadephia childhood, particularly in tales about his little brother Russell and friends Old Weird Harold and Fat Albert. Unlike his contemporaries on the circuit, he avoided the use of harsh language. As a result, Cosby was deemed acceptable to white audiences which found these stories to be universal. He won fame for his performances and a series of best-selling record albums. His breakout routine was an imagined conversation between God and a skeptical Noah, which made its first appearance on his first vinyl release.

TV producer Sheldon Leonard landed Cosby a break-out television role in I Spy (1965), the first time an African-American actor starred in a weekly dramatic television series. Cosby won two Emmy Awards for his portrayal of undercover CIA agent Alexander Scott.

Bill Cosby then appeared in a series of shows named after himself: The Bill Cosby Show, The New Bill Cosby Show, the animated Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Cos, The Cosby Show, The Cosby Mysteries, and Cosby (based upon the British series One Foot In The Grave). He has producer, writer, director and even composer credits on many of his projects.

Bill Cosby was a regular on the Captain Kangaroo show in the 1980s, presenting the "Picture Pages" segment which was later syndicated on its own.

Bill Cosby won several Grammy awards for his comedy albums, had a top forty song ("Little Old Man") in 1969, and sang on a number of albums. He won more Grammies for comedy than any other artist, winning every year from 1965 to 1970 and again in 1987. As of 2005, he had 3 gold- and 6 platinum-certified comedy albums. He has also written several humorous books about different aspects of life, based on his stand-up comedy such as Fatherhood and Love and Marriage. In fact, Fatherhood and Time Flies were the best selling non-fiction hardback books of 1986 and 1987, respectively.

Cosby has also made occasional forays into film acting, but the critical and popular success which came so abundantly to his stage and television work has not blessed his movie performances: His natural charisma has often been undermined by mediocre scripts in films like The Devil and Max Devlin (1981) and Ghost Dad (1990), and the notorious flop Leonard Part 6 (1987), although his work in ensemble casts in Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do it Again, a pair of productions headed up by Sidney Poitier in the mid-1970s, received favorable reviews, as did his supporting role in Francis Ford Coppola's Jack (1996).

One of Bill Cosby's more colorful performances was his portrayal as a bigot in Bill Cosby on Prejudice (1971).

His many commercial endorsements, made at the height of his popularity in the 1970s and '80s for products such as Jell-O, Eastman Kodak, and Coca-Cola, have been widely parodied.

Bill Cosby earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1977: his dissertation concerned the use of the Fat Albert series as a teaching aid. He has attempted to integrate education with television in some projects, such as Picture Pages, where Cosby taught children how to draw in a series of shorts aired by PBS. Notably, he structured the 80's Cosby family to represent children at all ages, and the addition of daughter Sondra (Sabrina LaBeouf) as a Princeton-educated lawyer is meant to send the message that good parenting and education of children leads to success. The Cosby Show also addressed social issues, such as drugs, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, and gang violence.

Bill Cosby is now a leading educational philanthropist.

He hosted the television program Kids Say the Darndest Things, which aired from 1996 through 2002.

He is married to Camille Hanks and they have four daughters. Their only son Ennis Cosby, aged 27, was murdered on January 16, 1997, while changing a flat tire in Los Angeles, California. On March 12, 1997, his assailant, Mikail Markhasev, was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with attempted robbery and murder. He was convicted on July 7, 1998 and is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Honors

Cosby received Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.
Cosby received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cincinnati during the 2001 graduation ceremony.
In a British 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was voted amongst the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.

Political views

Bill Cosby's sociopolitical views, especially about the African-American community, are quite complex and have often been reduced to a simplistic representation. He has a long history of philanthropic endeavors to encourage equality and advancement while other statements he made were taken by the U.S. public as being indictful of the Black Community.
During the 1970's, Cosby was on the "enemies list" of President Richard Nixon.
He was the first bigtime entertainer to cancel an appearance in Cincinnati after a boycott was called in response to the 2001 Cincinnati Riots. His support of the Black community's struggle encouraged other stars to follow & was pivotal to demonstrate it was a nationally recognized incident.
Cosby has been critical of Black communities regarding those who hold low standards and allowing fatherless single parent households, high crime rates, and high illiteracy rates. He encouraged ownership of those problems and a more proactive effort from within the Black community to fix those problems. He expanded upon his remarks in San Jose, CA during an event to promote the Read-2-Lead Classic. The way his speeches were portrayed by popular media provoked a great deal of anger from Black communities. U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) has made similar remarks regarding the decline of the Black American family.

Since his youth in 1950s Philadelphia, Cosby has been a fan and supporter of jazz music. He hosted at his home the 1983 wedding of jazz innovator Miles Davis and actress Cicely Tyson, and on The Cosby Show he wrote the fathers of both Cliff Huxtable and his wife to be aged jazz musicians. Cosby has stated, many times in his stand up shows, that "kids these days don't know what the jazz is all about".

Controversy

In 1997, Cosby was the target of allegations from Autumn Jackson, a young woman who claimed she was his daughter. In court, Cosby testified that he had sex once with Jackson's mother, when he was already married to his wife. Cosby further admitted he gave financial support to Jackson's mother. Cosby said he told Jackson he would be a father figure to her, but that he was not her father. Autumn Jackson was later convicted on extortion charges.
In January 2005 a woman alleged she was drugged and fondled by Cosby in May 2004. In a statement from Cosby's publicist, Cosby's attorney said, "the charges are categorically false and we have no further comment." Pennsylvania authorities found "insufficient credible and admissible evidence" to support the woman's claims, according to Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor.
In February 2005 a second woman, California lawyer Tamara Green (nee Lucier), came forward alleging that in the 1970s she was drugged and groped by Cosby. Cosby's attorney has denied any merit to the allegations, stating "Mr. Cosby does not have any knowledge of a woman named Tamara Green or Tamara Lucia."
While prosecutors have declined to press charges against Cosby, the first accuser has filed a federal civil suit against the performer. Attorneys for the woman suing Bill Cosby for sexual assault claim that at least ten other women are prepared to testify about "prior similar sexual assaults and/or drugging incidents" perpetrated by the comedian.

Quotations

"Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home and be happy."
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
"Our children are angry. The profanity is out in the street. It's on the buses and in the subway. Our children are trying to tell us something, and we are not listening."
"The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague."

Partial discography

Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow Right! 1963
I Started Out as a Child 1964
Why is there air? 1965
Wonderfulness 1966
Revenge 1967
Silver Throat: Bill Cosby Sings 1967
To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With 1968
200 mph ~1968
Bill Cosby Sings: Hooray for the Salvation Army Band 1968
8:15 12:15 1968
The Best of Bill Cosby 1969
It's True! It's True 1969
Live Madison Square Garden Center 1970
Sports 1970
More of the Best of Bill Cosby 1970
For Adults Only 1971
Talk to Kids About Drugs 1971
When I Was a Kid 1971
Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby 1972
Fat Albert 1973
Bill 1973
At Last Bill Cosby Really Sings 1974
Bill Cosby is Not Himself These Days 1976
Disco Bill 1977
My Father Confused Me... What Must I Do? What Must I Do? 1977
Bill's Best Friend 1978
Bill Cosby: Himself 1983
Hard Headed Boys (EP) 1985
Those of You With or Without Children, You'll Understand 1986
Oh Baby 1991
20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of Bill Cosby 2001
The Bill Cosby Collection 2004