| Cuba Gooding, Jr. - Biography |
| Cuba Gooding, Jr. - Biography |
"Show me the money!" If you haven't heard this latest favorite catch-phrase, you've obviously been living under a rock. Not only did Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire manage to boil the entire concept of sports greed into this one manageable and serviceable sound bite, but it accomplished a couple of other things as well: first, the film acquitted, elevated, and celebrated the sports agents, a generally unpopular breed of human; second, it provided Cuba Gooding, Jr., with his big break. Make that his second big break.
Think back to 1991, when the release of John Singleton's definitive urban drama, Boyz N the Hood, suddenly conferred upon Cuba Gooding, Jr., status as the next big thing. Naturally, it was a disappointment to Gooding's fans when he seemed to drop out of sight, surfacing only occasionally in films that would have gone straight to movie hell if not for his presence. What happened? Well, the truth of the matter is that he is a young black actor, and after the handful of good roles generally available for young black actors is divided among Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, and Wesley Snipes, there just aren't that many challenging roles left for the Cuba Gooding, Jrs., of today's Hollywood. If anyone's career has proved that sorry truth, it's been Gooding's.
Cuba's father, the original Cuba Gooding, was the lead singer for the seventies group the Main Ingredient, and when their single "Everybody Plays the Fool" rocketed the band to stardom in 1972, life changed drastically for the Gooding clan. Not only did the newfound success mean that the family uprooted from their home in the Bronx to move to L.A., but they were shown the money in a big way.
Cuba's father left his family in 1974, leaving little of that wealth behind for his three children. Junior, who became a born-again Christian at age thirteen, attended four different Southern California high schools, and landed the job of class president at three of them. In 1984, at the age of sixteen, he scored his first professional gig as a breakdancer for Lionel Richie's performance at the Olympics.
His appearance in a high school production of Li'l Abner gained him notice by the parent of a friend--luckily for Cuba, this particular parent was an agent. A string of auditions yielded work in commercials, one of which got him a small part on an episode of Hill Street Blues. After a number of takes were ruined because he couldn't find his mark, Gooding realized that the tape on the floor was there to tell him something, and decided some lessons were in order if he was going to get serious about acting. Classes and workshops landed him several other awe-quashing TV roles and a feature-film debut as the celebrated "Boy Getting Haircut" in Eddie Murphy's Coming to America.
In 1990, Gooding auditioned for John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood and plucked what was to be the first plum of his career: his performance as Tre Styles, a young black man trying to find a way out of the South Central Los Angeles ghetto in which he lives, humanized a part of America most of the public had only heard about on the news. Singleton liked literally everything about Cuba's audition--even the shirt he was wearing that day wound up in most of the Boyz publicity stills.
Over the next few years, Gooding popped up in several unworthy movies, in which he wasted great performances on losing efforts. Certainly, A Few Good Men wasn't a flop, but no one wanted to pay good money for Gladiator or Judgment Night. Paul Hogan caught Gooding's appearance on the Dennis Miller Show and subsequently cast him in Lightning Jack. The film proved Gooding a gifted comic, but not much else--let's face it, by 1994, Paul Hogan was Australian for has-been.
Gooding turned on the charm as Halle Berry's would-be beau in Losing Isaiah, and he was deservedly singled out for his performance in Outbreak, a dubious honor to be sure. But he was working steadily, and that made it possible for him to marry his high school sweetheart, a teacher's aide named Sara Kapfer, and allowed the couple to have two sons, Spencer and Mason.
After this string of less-than-exciting opportunities, you can imagine Gooding's relief when director Cameron Crowe called and offered him the part of Jerry Maguire's Rod Tidwell. The audition process had been arduous--most people involved in the decision-making process felt that Gooding, at 5'11", was too short for the part. But no one could deny that he had thrown himself into every audition--he'd been brash, explosive, and even dropped his trousers on command. However, it was a phone conversation with the actor that finally convinced Crowe: "There aren't that many big parts for a black actor in Hollywood," he told the director. "This is my shot."
With the gargantuan success of Jerry Maguire, Gooding is once again an actor to be reckoned with. He has been rewarded with laudatory reviews, a Golden Globe nomination, and best of all, a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and the offers are pouring in. He'll next appear opposite Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt in Old Friends, and it's a credit to his range that he's being talked up for two vastly different roles: that of a fed in U.S. Marshals, opposite Tommy Lee Jones, and that of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis. Few actors get a second shot at stardom, and now that he's back in the spotlight, Cuba Gooding, Jr., is wary, yet optimistic, about the future. "It's so hard to predict. If I'm accurate, it's out of luck. And if I'm inaccurate, I'll feel like an idiot for guessing in the first place."