To play Charlie Parker, Forest Whitaker shut himself in a loft with a saxophone
Preparing for Clint Eastwood's Bird, Forest Whitaker took sax lessons and lived in a loft furnished with little more than a bed, a couch and an alto saxophone. The gamble paid off: Cannes named him Best Actor in 1988, eighteen years before his Oscar for playing Idi Amin.
Longview, Texas, is Whitaker's birthplace, and July 15, 1961, his birthday; his mother taught special education and his father sold insurance. While he was still in elementary school the family settled in Carson, a suburb of Los Angeles. His first stage part was the lead in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood.
His route to acting was roundabout. A football scholarship took him to Cal Poly Pomona, but a back injury pushed him into studying singing, and in 1980 he toured England with a college chamber choir. He then trained as an operatic tenor at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music before moving into its drama conservatory, graduating in acting in 1982. Decades later, in 2004, he was working towards a degree in peace and reconciliation studies at New York University.
Early screen work cast him as a high school footballer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), then alongside big names in Scorsese's The Color of Money, Oliver Stone's Platoon, and Good Morning, Vietnam with Robin Williams. His first lead, as the jazz saxophonist in Bird, followed months of research and conversations with people who had known Parker. In Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992) he adopted an English accent to play Jody, a captured British soldier, and Variety praised the performance as big-hearted.
The Academy Award for Best Actor came for The Last King of Scotland (2006), in which he played the Ugandan dictator. He has also directed, starting with the TV film Strapped in 1993 and going on to Waiting to Exhale. Later he took the role of Saw Gerrera across Star Wars film, animation and the series Andor. Off screen he became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2011, was later named a Special Envoy for Peace and Reconciliation, and runs a non-profit, the Whitaker Peace and Development Initiative.
Source: Forest Whitaker
