While his "gentle giant" characters typically display innocence, indecision, and timidity along with a strong underlying humanity, he has certainly not shied away from the edgier, darker corners of life as his occasional hitmen and other menacing streetwise types can attest. Whitaker continued to work with a number of well-known directors throughout the 1990s. This led to more visible roles in the "A" class films Platoon (1986), Stakeout (1987), and Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), which culminated in his breakout lead portrayal of the tortured jazz icon 'Charlie "Bird" Parker' in Clint Eastwood's passion project Bird (1988), for which Whitaker won the Cannes Film Festival award for "best actor" and a Golden Globe nomination. His one big scene as a naive-looking pool player who out-hustles Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson was pure electricity. The movie that truly put him on the map was The Color of Money (1986). He gained experience on TV as well with featured spots on such varied shows as Diff'rent Strokes (1978) and Cagney & Lacey (1981), not to mention the TV-movie Civil War epic North & South: Book 1, North & South (1985) and its sequel. He went on to play another sports-oriented student, a wrestler, in his second film Vision Quest (1985). Whitaker made his film debut at the age of 21 in the raucous comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) wherein he played, quite naturally, a footballer. This, in turn, led to another scholarship at Berkeley with a renewed focus on acting and the performing stage. Later, however, he transferred to USC where he set his concentration on music and earned two more scholarships training as an operatic tenor. The athletically-inclined Whitaker initially found his way into college via a football scholarship. His family moved to South Central Los Angeles in 1965. Whitaker was born on Jin Longview, Texas, to Laura Francis (Smith), a special education teacher, and Forest Steven Whitaker, an insurance salesman. He is the fourth African-American male to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, following in the footsteps of Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Jamie Foxx. He won an Academy Award for his performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the film The Last King of Scotland (2006), and has also won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. Forest Steven Whitaker has packaged a king-size talent into his hulking 6' 2", 220 lb.
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