Fantastic Mr Foxx

Who is Jamie Foxx? Good question. In 36 years he's been so many things. In 1989, when he was still going by his birth name of Eric Morlon Bishop, he was just a former highschool quarterback, until he went to a New York comedy club and - isn't this like a movie? - his girlfriend dared him to go on stage. 'She said, "I bet ya can't do that," and I said, "Bet I can,"' grins Foxx. And he got up and did Bill Cosby as a gangster and Nation Of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan with a lisp, brought the house down and - boom --became a comic.

The morphing into his professional name, 'The Foxx' wasn't done on a whim. 'I chose an androgynous title because back then woman comics were at a premium and got more mic time. Club owners would book them sight unseen,' he explains. By 1990, Foxx was making an impression in In Living Color, the hit TV sketch series that also launched the careers of J-Lo, Jim Carrey and all those Wayans brothers. 'My special bit was Ugly Wanda - she was a cross-eyed, big-bootied gal.'

Come 1994, 'singer' was his new job description. 'Peep This' made No. 12 on the American charts. Two years later, The Jamie Foxx Show first aired on TV. It ran for six years, time enough for its lead to add 'actor' to the CV. 'I did movies I really didn't want to do - in interviews I'd talk about the clothes - but it was experience, and then I was acting with Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday, Will Smith in Ali and Tom Cruise in Collateral.' Some critics said Foxx's loyal sidekick and nerdy taxi driver deftly stole Ali and Collateral from their respective stars, but now they're all good friends. 'They ring me direct, not through their PAs,' Foxx says. 'None of that "Mr Cruise is on the line for you."'

So that's quarterback, stand-up, drag queen, rapper and actor. So far. Have we mentioned runner, classical pianist, composer, writer and producer?

Today Jamie Foxx is being Ray Charles. Or at least we're here at The Dorchester hotel while Foxx promotes his performance in the 152-minute biopic Ray, the film which should land him the Best Actor Oscar and finally turn him into a massive star. Thanks to the buzz and two Golden Globe nominations, Foxx has seen his asking price leap from $1 million to $10 million overnight. In the pumped-up, Armani-suited, tattooed flesh, Foxx doesn't even remotely resemble the blind musician - 'I've replaced the 30lb I lost for the role' - but he's still exquisite casting. Like Foxx, Ray Charles was a contradictory, high-maintenance polymath - as well as a junkie and a genius who jumped from R&B ('What I'd Say') to Country & Western ('I Can't Stop Loving You') to lush MOR ('Georgia On My Mind').

Tell him it's the most astonishing piece of acting you've witnessed in years and Foxx is instantly on. Praise revs his motor. For 35 rapid-fire minutes, opinions, one-liners and disembodied voices - along with Ray Charles, Eddie Murphy and an unnamed but currently huge hiphop artist - ricochet around the room. 'Say, baby, you wanna get down and do good for ya man?' Foxx on form makes Robin Williams seem like a sloth. Did I know director Taylor Hackford fought to get him the part? That Ray was shot for a piddling $18 million? That he forensically studied thousands of tapes, albums and home movies? That he chose to blind himself temporarily with prosthetic eye-pieces, all the better to emulate his idol? 'They had to hold me down in the chair but it was important to me not to cheat.'

Which is more than Charles himself managed. Unusually for a biopic assembled with the subject still breathing (Charles died during the last weeks of filming), Ray is unsparing about its subject's marital infidelity and heroin addiction. Did Charles have any inkling? 'Sure,' Foxx says. 'I talked with him before filming and told him it all had to be in the movie and he had to tell me the details. And Ray did, because he knew I understood.'

Of course he did. Foxx and Charles share more than a passing resemblance. There's the brashness bordering on arrogance ('I am here to make you hip,' Foxx said to Cruise the first time they met). Then the entourages (Foxx's crew is rumoured to outnumber P. Diddy's and, yes, they are buddies). Both had children born out of wedlock - Charles's almost defy numbering while Foxx has a nine-year-old daughter, Corinne, who lives with her mother. (Foxx is currently dating Daddy Day Care actress Leila Arcieri.) Neither man much trusted white people until late in life. That's not surprising, given that Foxx's Texas childhood was splattered with 'the N word'.

'Hey, Taylor Hackford was the first white man I've ever hung out with and I'm 36,' he shrugs. 'But he and Michael Mann, the director of Collateral, went to bat for me with the studios.' And if Ray liked his birds and booze, Foxx is a legendary party animal. As a co-worker told Newsweek, 'At a Jamie Foxx bash, anything goes.'

And yet, when Foxx says 'I was well raised', he means it. Well, and somewhat bizarrely. If Ray Charles had a remarkably steely and motivating mother, Foxx's equivalent is his late Baptist grandmother, who adopted him at seven months from her adopted daughter. 'Her marriage had failed and, well, raising a kid...' Foxx's voice trails off in pain. His mother didn't show up at Christmas and his father's Muslim faith distanced him from his Christian son. Small wonder that praise - and the lack of it - is his trigger. Luckily, his grandmother told him he was special and could do anything. 'So I did.'