Skid Role

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A complicated man

It may be an indelicate analogy considering the grim mental-health issues raised by "The Soloist," but Foxx's career has a split personality. The man who asked for a psychiatrist to be on call while he plumbed the depths of a scabby, heart-wrenching film role is also the same guy who used his satellite comedy show last week for a cringe-inducing attack on young Miley Cyrus in which he suggested she smoke crack, make a sex tape with her father and "catch chlamydia from a bicycle seat." (He later apologized to Cyrus during a "Tonight Show" appearance.)

The star shrugged when asked which of his fans are getting the real Foxx. "Who I am depends on where you see me."

If it's hard to pin down Foxx, it's because the man is a master imitator of others. "He is a brilliant mimic," Wright said. "That may be his most obvious talent. But if he wasn't also a gifted actor, it would just be empty imitation, no performance underneath."

Foxx was born Eric Marlon Bishop in December 1967 in Linden, Texas, and while his specific career path was a vague and ever-changing one, it was clear he was going to be someone whom others cheered. He was a football star in high school and an accomplished musician before that, but later he came to realize that deep down he longed most for the approval of his birth parents, who gave him away before his first birthday. Raised by his maternal grandmother, he scored touchdowns on Friday nights, sang in a Baptist church on Sundays and played the role of restless young buck in between.

A few years ago, when talking about his youth, Foxx said he had no regrets that his birth parents were around but, because of their lifestyles and the family physics, were not truly invested in his day-to-day life; his doting grandmother was so influential and supportive in his life that he said it was easy to shrug off the missing-in-action parents. Now he says he has learned that you can ignore wounds but that doesn't help them heal.

"My dad lived 28 miles away and I was quarterback of my high school team, and this is in Texas where football matters, and he never came to a game," Foxx said. Later he added, "I always had everything going, tight, why wouldn't anybody want somebody like me?"

A scholarship took him west to California. Foxx hinted that there was some history in the family of mental illness, but he also insisted that it was some mystery psychotropic drug dropped into a cocktail that sent him skittering along the edge of his psyche.