Actors - Bill Cosby

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	Actors - Bill Cosby

William Henry "Bill" Cosby, Jr., Ed.D (born July 12, 1937) is an American actor, comedian, television producer and activist.

He was the first African-American man to star in a television series (I Spy
, in which he co-starred with Robert Culp during the mid-1960s), and also became well-known for his stand-up comedy during 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 very popular (helping to rescue NBC from possible bankruptcy), and notable for being one of the first television programs to star a middle-class Black family. During the 1980s, Cosby was among the highest-paid entertainers in the United States.

In recent years, Cosby's reputation has been affected by his controversial statements regarding the advancement of the Black community, and allegations of sexual harassment.

Career

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 began attending 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 Marines 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 Philadelphia 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.

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.

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

He 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).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Bill Cosby ]

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Actors - Bill Cosby

Career

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