Steve Pratt discovers how Jamie Foxx managed to find the music of the legendary blues performer Ray Charles and listens to the emerging actor's own experiences of racism.

LIFE is good when you live in LA and get what Jamie Foxx calls the sizzle. "It's very, very exciting," he says. "I had 70 missed calls on my two phones alone. I think the next couple of years will be testing. This is the Cinderella time, so it's all fun."

Foxx is on a high, despite flying in from Los Angeles only the night before. That was in the wake of receiving a record-breaking three nominations for the Golden Globes. The fact that he only converted one into a win won't hold him back. He's favourite to take home the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of singer Ray Charles in the biopic Ray at the Academy Awards ceremony next month.

Six years ago when Foxx was over here promoting his supporting role in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, no-one could have predicted the comedy star would become Hollywood's hot property, thanks to Collateral, playing the cab driver with hit man Tom Cruise in the back seat.

Despite the buzz, Foxx is keeping the situation in perspective. He mentions how Grammy-nominated singer Kanye West had been asking him what to do next after such success. "I compare everything to sports. Like I was telling him, because he was worried about the next step, when Jordan played in the Nix and scored 52 points he didn't cancel his trip to the LA Clippers the next day. He kept playing. You just keep playing ball and hope to get another game like this," he says.

Foxx felt that what made Ray the movie special for him and others was showing them things about the business, including the downside. The makers wanted to tell the story of Ray Charles warts and all, including drug and women problems. "It was a good thing this was an independent film. Some of the things we got into this film, we wouldn't have got in if we'd been with a big company," he says.

"Movies now just want to sell as much as they can. When was the last chance you got the chance to do a movie that was real with the impurities, imperfections and flaws. That's why biopix sometimes suffer because there's someone saying, 'We can't do this, we must keep this reputation looking good'.

"Ray Charles was the type of guy who said, 'If you don't show this, it's not going to be the real thing'. He was a person who took chances. We take it for granted when we say, 'Back in the day...' but it was really tough then.

"I'm 37 and when I was in the seventh grade, I got caught dancing. I was from a country town and had to go to the church and explain to the reverend why I was doing the Moonwalk. I was going to go straight to hell. That's how he wanted the movie to be told - you must tell everything or you don't have nothing."

Ray Charles worked with Foxx and the movie-makers on the movie. In an interview a few months before his death, Charles said about director Taylor Hackford's film, "He's got my life down pretty good".

He and Foxx played piano together before the cameras rolled. The actor admits it was nerve-racking beforehand. "When he comes in, you immediately feel, 'Wow', you feel like the young son. When we started, he said, 'Jamie, stop worrying about anything. If you play the blues, you can do anything'," he recalls.

He says. "I came back a different person. It was not just a young kid looking for approval. I said if I was going to play him there were certain questions I had to ask him."

He was as surprised as other people of his generation to learn the extent of Charles' influence on music and trends, and just how many difficulties he had to overcome.

Foxx knows the debt he owes his grandmother for encouraging him to play the piano from the age of five. "She said that if you learn piano, you learn to read quicker. I always kept the piano because it makes you different to someone else. At 13, I was playing piano for the church and at 15 making money doing it. I was playing all over, at wine and cheese parties on the other side of the track.

"I remember I was 15 and a friend drove me way out in the country to a big house. The man who answered the door said, 'What's two of you doing here? I can't have two of you niggers in my house at the same time'. Being from the South you get numbed to that word.

"I go in, he takes me to walk-in closet and gives me the jacket with the patches. I played and afterwards he gave me 100 bucks, a lot for a 15-year-old at that time.

"I go to give him the jacket back and he said, 'I can't wear that jacket any more'. He made me wait outside in the street for my lift. Sitting with the $100 in my pocket made me think what my grandmother said - that I was going to use the piano not just to make $100 but a lot of people's thoughts in that house changed a little bit, certainly about black folk, when they saw me play."

* Ray (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 20/01/2005