Bill Cosby

Dr. William Henry Cosby, Jr., (born July 12, 1937) is an African American actor and comedian. His sitcom, The Cosby Show was very successful, and notable for being one of the first to star a well-to-do middle-class African-American family. At one time, he was one of the most highly paid entertainers in the United States.

Career

Cosby was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He joined the United States Navy in tenth grade and completed high school through correspondence courses. 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, and was discovered by Sheldon Leonard, who landed Cosby a break-out television role in I Spy (1965). Cosby won two Emmy Awards for his portrayal of an undercover CIA agent; it was also the first time an African-American actor starred in a weekly dramatic television series.

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.

He won several Grammy awards for comedy albums, had a top forty song ("Little Old Man") in 1969, and sang on a number of 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. Despite his success in other media, Cosby's film acting career has been characterized by mediocre projects such as Leonard Part 6 (1987) and Ghost Dad (1990), although he did star in a series of successful comedy films with Sidney Poitier in the mid-1970s such as Let's Do it Again.

A colorful work of Cosby was his portrayal as a bigot in Bill Cosby on Prejudice (1971).

Cosby earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts in 1977: his thesis 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 Sandra as a Princeton-educated lawyer is meant to show how good parenting and education of children leads to success. The Cosby Show also served as a vehicle to raise issues of drugs, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, and gang violence. He is now a leading educational philanthropist.

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 Mikail Markhasev was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with the attempted robbery and shooting of Ennis.

Cosby received Kennedy Center Honors in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

Political views

Cosby became the center of controversy in May 2004 when he made public remarks critical of low-income African Americans whom he believed to be deprioritizing education in favor of sports and fashion. While Cosby received a sharp backlash, he was largely unapologetic for the remarks and continued his criticism during a speech on July 1 at a Rainbow Coalition meeting commemorating the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Cosby admonished struggling young men to "stop beating up your wife because you can't find a job" and stated that African-Americans had forgotten the sacrifices of those in the Civil Rights Movement. The talk was interrupted several times by applause and received praise from leaders such as Jesse Jackson. [1] (http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/01/cosby.comments.ap/index.html)

Starting in 2004, Cosby publicly denounced black communities for having low standards in allowing fatherless single parent households, high crime rates, and high illiteracy rates. He further stated that it was up to the black community to fix its own problems. He expanded upon his remarks in San Jose, CA during an event to promote the Read-2-Lead Classic. Anger over his remarks continued, but often the validity of what Cosby said wasn't in question (Senator Barack Obama had made similar remarks regarding the decline of the African-American family), it was the forum that was the issue.

Quotations

"Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home."

"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,"