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BILL COSBY

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Actors, Entertainers, Entertainers B, Entertainers C

BillCosby

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

Full Name: William Henry Cosby, Jr.

Description: Actor, Comedian, US

Known For: Known for his early recordings of – “Fat Albert”

Location: United States of America

Date Born: 12th July 1937
Location Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Photo Comments: Photo by Allan Light – used with permission. Public domain.

CONTACT DETAILS
Website:  Official website

Other Links: See below:

YOUTUBE VIDEO

BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE

Bill Cosby

An American comedian, actor, television producer, and activist.

William Henry “Bill” Cosby Jr. (born July 12, 1937) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, author, and activist.

Cosby’s start in stand-up comedy began at the hungry i in San Francisco, followed by landing a starring role in the 1960s television show I Spy. During its first two seasons, he was also a regular on the children’s television series The Electric Company.

Using the Fat Albert character developed during his stand-up routines, Cosby created, produced, and hosted the animated comedy television series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, a show that ran from 1972 to 1985, centering on a group of young friends growing up in an urban area. Throughout the 1970s, Cosby starred in a number of films, occasionally returning to film later in his career. In 1976, Cosby earned a Doctor of Education degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His dissertation discussed the use of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids as a teaching tool in elementary schools.

Beginning in the 1980s, Cosby produced and starred in a television sitcom, The Cosby Show, which aired from 1984 to 1992 and was rated as the number one show in America for five years, 1984 through 1989. The sitcom highlighted the experiences and growth of an affluent African-American family. Cosby produced the Cosby Show spin-off sitcom A Different World, which aired from 1987 to 1993; starred in the sitcom Cosby from 1996 to 2000; and hosted Kids Say the Darndest Things for two seasons, from 1998 to 2000.

Since 2000, Cosby has been accused by numerous women of sexual assault and rape, with the earliest alleged incidents taking place in the mid-1960s and with many stated to have been drug facilitated. He has denied the allegations and has never been criminally charged. Most of the acts alleged by his accusers fall outside the statutes of limitations for legal proceedings. However, as of July 2015, two lawsuits against Cosby are pending, including one for defamation of character.

Cosby was born on July 12, 193 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is one of four sons of Anna Pearl (née Hite), a maid, and William Henry Cosby Sr., who served as a cook in the U.S. Navy.During much of Cosby’s early childhood, his father was away in the U.S. armed forces, spending several years fighting in World War II. As a student, he described himself as a class clown. Cosby was the captain of both the baseball team and the track and field team at Mary Channing Wister Public School in Philadelphia, as well as the class president. Early on, though, teachers noted his propensity for clowning around rather than studying. At FitzSimons Junior High School, Cosby began acting in plays as well as continuing his devotion to playing sports. He went on to Philadelphia’s Central High School, a magnet and university prep school. In addition, Cosby was working before and after school, selling produce, shining shoes, and stocking shelves at a supermarket to help out the family. He transferred to Germantown High School, but failed the tenth grade. Instead of repeating, he got a job as an apprentice at a shoe repair shop, which he liked, but could not see himself doing the rest of his life. Subsequently, he joined the Navy, serving at the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, Naval Station Argentia, Newfoundland and at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. During his four years in the Navy, Cosby served as a Hospital Corpsman working in physical therapy with Navy and Marine Corps personnel injured during the Korean War.

He finished his equivalency diploma via correspondence courses and was awarded a track and field scholarship to Philadelphia’s Temple University in 1961. There, he studied physical education while running track and playing fullback on the university’s football team.

As Cosby progressed through his undergraduate studies, he continued to hone his talent for humor, joking with fellow enlistees in the service and then with college friends. When he began bartending at a Philadelphia club to earn money, he became more aware of his ability to make people laugh. After using humor on his customers and seeing his tips increase, he then took his talent to the stage

Cosby left Temple to pursue a career in comedy, lining up standup jobs at clubs first in Philadelphia and then in New York City, where he appeared at The Gaslight Cafe beginning in 1962. He booked dates in cities such as Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Washington, D.C.. He received national exposure on NBC’s The Tonight Show in the summer of 1963. This led to a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records, who, in 1964, released his debut LP Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right!, the first of a series of comedy albums.

While many comics of the time were using the growing freedom of that decade to explore material that was controversial and sometimes risqué, Cosby was making his reputation with humorous recollections of his childhood. Many Americans wondered about the absence of race as a topic in Cosby’s stories. As Cosby’s success grew he had to defend his choice of material regularly; as he argued, “A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s the way I see it too.’ Okay. He’s white. I’m Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right? So I figure this way I’m doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.”

Younger, well-established comics like Jerry Seinfeld have credited Cosby as an innovator both as a practitioner of the genre of standup comedy, but also as a person who paved the way for comics to break into sitcom television. Seinfeld said of Cosby: “He opened a door for all of us, for all of the networks to even consider that this was a way to create a character, was to take someone who can hold an audience just by being up there and telling their story. He created that. He created the whole idea of taking a quote-unquote ‘comic’ and developing a TV show just from a persona that you see onstage.” Comedian Larry Wilmore also saw a connection between Cosby’s standup, in the concert film Bill Cosby: Himself, and the later success of the The Cosby Show, saying: “It’s clear that the concert is the template for The Cosby Show.”

Cosby performed his first TV standup special in 30 years, “Bill Cosby: Far From Finished”, on Comedy Central on November 23, 2013.

Cosby’s last show of the “Far From Finished” tour was performed at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, Georgia on May 2, 2015.

In July 2015, Deadline Hollywood Daily reported that Cosby’s agency since 2012, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), stopped representing him in late 2014, leaving Cosby without representation in Hollywood.

Bill_cosby_1969

I Spy

In 1965, Cosby was cast alongside Robert Culp in the I Spy espionage adventure series on NBC. I Spy became the first weekly dramatic television series to feature an African American in a starring role. At first Cosby and NBC executives were concerned that some affiliates might be unwilling to carry the series. At the beginning of the 1965 season, four stations declined the show; they were in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. Viewers were taken with the show’s exotic locales and the authentic chemistry between the stars, and it became one of the ratings hits of that television season. I Spy finished among the twenty most-watched shows that year, and Cosby would be honored with three consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. When accepting his third Emmy for the show, Cosby told the audience: “Let the message be known to bigots and racists that they don’t count!”

During the run of the series, Cosby continued to do stand-up comedy performances and recorded a half-dozen record albums for Warner Bros. Records. He also began to dabble in singing, recording Silver Throat: Bill Cosby Sings in 1967, which provided him with a hit single with his recording of Little Ole Man (Uptight, Everything’s Alright). As a single, the song sold over one million copies in the U.S. (achieving “gold” status), and hit number 4 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. He would record several more musical albums into the early 1970s, but he continued to record primarily stand-up comedy work.

In June 1968, Billboard reported that Cosby had turned down a five-year, US$3.5 million contract renewal offer and would leave the label in August that year to record for his own record label.

Tetragrammaton Records was a division of the Campbell, Silver, Cosby (CSC) Corporation, the Los Angeles-based production company founded by Cosby, his manager Roy Silver, and filmmaker Bruce Post Campbell. It produced films as well as records, including Cosby’s television specials, the Fat Albert cartoon special and series and several motion pictures. CSC hired Artie Mogull as President of the label and Tetragrammaton was fairly active during 1968–69 (its most successful signing was British heavy rock band Deep Purple) but it quickly went into the red and ceased trading during 1970.

Fat Albert, The Bill Cosby Show, and the 1970s

Cosby pursued a variety of additional television projects and appeared as a regular guest host on The Tonight Show and as the star of an annual special for NBC. He returned with another series in 1969, The Bill Cosby Show, a situation comedy that ran for two seasons. Cosby played a physical education teacher at a Los Angeles high school. While only a modest critical success, the show was a ratings hit, finishing eleventh in its first season. Cosby was lauded for using African-American performers such as Lillian Randolph, Moms Mabley, and Rex Ingram as characters. According to commentary on the Season 1 DVD’s for the show, Cosby was at odds with NBC over his refusal to include a laugh track in the show (he felt that viewers had the ability to find humor for themselves when watching a TV show). He was originally contracted with NBC to do the show for two seasons, and he believes the show was not renewed afterwards for that reason.

After The Bill Cosby Show left the air, Cosby returned to his education. He began graduate work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For the PBS series The Electric Company, Cosby recorded several segments teaching reading skills to young children.

In 1972, Cosby received an MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was also back in prime time with a variety series, The New Bill Cosby Show. However, this time he met with poor ratings, and the show lasted only a season. More successful was a Saturday morning show, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, hosted by Cosby and based on his own childhood. That series ran from 1972 to 1979, and as The New Fat Albert Show in 1979 and The Adventures of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids in 1984. Some schools used the program as a teaching tool, and Cosby himself wrote a dissertation on it, “An Integration of the Visual Media Via ‘Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids’ Into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning”, as partial fulfillment of obtaining his 1976 doctorate in education, also from the University of Massachusetts. Subsequently, Temple University, where Cosby had begun but never finished his undergraduate studies, would grant him his bachelor’s degree on the basis of “life experience.”

Also during the 1970s, Cosby and other African-American actors, including Sidney Poitier, joined forces to make some successful comedy films that countered the violent “blaxploitation” films of the era. Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let’s Do It Again (1975) were generally praised, but much of Cosby’s film work has fallen flat. Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), costarring Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel; A Piece of the Action, with Poitier; and California Suite, a compilation of four Neil Simon plays, were all panned. In addition, Cos (1976) an hour-long variety show featuring puppets, sketches, and musical numbers, was canceled within the year. It was during this season that ABC decided to take advantage of this phase of Cosby’s career by associating with Filmation (producers of Fat Albert) in creating live-action segments starring Cosby for the 1964/1971 animated film Journey Back to Oz, which made its network premiere on Christmas 1976, and aired subsequently in syndication. Cosby was also a regular on children’s public television programs starting in the 1970s, hosting the “Picture Pages” segments that lasted into the early 1980s.

The Cosby Show and the 1980s

Cosby’s greatest television success came in September 1984 with the debut of The Cosby Show. The program aired weekly on NBC and went on to become the highest ranking sitcom of all time. For Cosby, the new situation comedy was a response to the increasingly violent and vulgar fare the networks usually offered. Cosby is an advocate for humor that is family-oriented. While working on The Cosby Show he held creative control, co-produced the series and involved himself in every aspect of production. Plots were often based on ideas that Cosby suggested while in meetings with the writing staff. The show had parallels to Cosby’s actual family life: like the characters Cliff and Claire Huxtable, Cosby and his wife Camille were college educated, financially successful, and had five children. Essentially a throwback to the wholesome family situation comedy, The Cosby Show was unprecedented in its portrayal of an intelligent, affluent, African-American family.

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Much of the material from the pilot and first season of The Cosby Show was taken from his video Bill Cosby: Himself, released in 1983. The series was an immediate success, debuting near the top of the ratings and staying there for most of its long run. The Cosby Show is one of only three American programs that have been #1 in the Nielsen ratings for at least five consecutive seasons, along with All in the Family and American Idol. People magazine called the show “revolutionary”, and Newsday concurred that it was a “real breakthrough.”

In 1987, Cosby attempted to return to film with the spy spoof Leonard Part 6. Although Cosby himself was producer and wrote the story, he realized during production that the film was not going to be what he wanted and publicly denounced it, warning audiences to stay away. Cosby even went so far as to personally collect the Golden Raspberry Awards the film received on Joan Rivers’ late-night talk show.

Sexual assault allegations

Cosby has been accused of drug facilitated sexual assault by over 40 women, although he has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime. The dates of the alleged assaults span from 1965 to 2008. Seventeen of the accusers have been represented by attorney Gloria Allred. People noted “no civil lawsuits based on the allegations are currently pending due to the statute of limitations in the various jurisdictions in which they have been made.” Cosby has declined to publicly discuss the accusations in past interviews offering no comment.[49] He told Florida Today, “people shouldn’t have to go through that and shouldn’t answer to innuendos.” In May 2015 he said, “I have been in this business 52 years and I’ve never seen anything like this. Reality is a situation and I can’t speak.”

In January 2000, then 20-year-old actress Lachele Covington, who had played a waitress on Cosby, alleged he had groped her, but the district attorney’s office “decided no crime had been committed”. In January 2004, Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee, accused him of drugging and fondling her; however, in February 2005, Montgomery County’s District Attorney said there would be no charges due to “insufficient credible and admissible evidence”. Constand filed a civil claim in March 2005, with 13 women as potential witnesses if the case went to court. Cosby settled out of court for an undisclosed amount in November 2006. After learning that charges were not pursued in the case, California lawyer Tamara Lucier Green, the only publicly named woman in the prior case, came forward with allegations in February 2005 that Cosby had drugged and assaulted her in the 1970s. His lawyer said that Cosby did not know her and the events did not happen. In a July 2005 Philadelphia Daily News interview, Beth Ferrier, one of the anonymous “Jane Doe” witnesses in the Constand case, alleged that in 1984 he drugged her coffee and she awoke with her clothes partially removed.

Discography

Comedy albums

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)
To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With (1968)
200 M.P.H. (1968)
8:15 12:15 (1969)
It’s True! It’s True! (1969)
Sports (1969)
Live: Madison Square Garden Center (1970)
When I Was a Kid (1971)
For Adults Only (1971)
Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs (1971)
Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby (1972)
Fat Albert (1973)
My Father Confused Me… What Must I Do? What Must I Do? (1977)
Bill’s Best Friend (1978)
Bill Cosby: Himself (1982)
Those of You With or Without Children, You’ll Understand (1986)
Oh, Baby! (1991)
Bill Cosby: Far from Finished (TV broadcast on November 23, 2013, Blu-ray, DVD, CD and digital distribution on November 26, 2013)

Music albums

Silver Throat: Bill Cosby Sings (1967)
Bill Cosby Sings Hooray for the Salvation Army Band! (1968)
Badfoot Brown & the Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band (1971)
Charles Mingus and Friends in Concert – As master of ceremonies (Columbia, 1972)
Bill Cosby Presents Badfoot Brown & the Bunions Bradford Funeral Marching Band (1972)
At Last Bill Cosby Really Sings (1974)
Bill Cosby Is Not Himself These Days (1976)
Disco Bill (1977)
Where You Lay Your Head (1990)
My Appreciation (1991)
Hello Friend: To Ennis, With Love (1997)
Quincy Jones & Bill Cosby – The Original Jam Sessions 1969 (2004)
Quincy Jones & Bill Cosby – The New Mixes Vol. 1 (2004)
State of Emergency (2009)
Keep Standing (2010)

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