Chris Rock takes up hosting duties at the Oscars this Sunday night. Here are ten things you may not know about the actor/comedian.
1. Rock was born in the state of South Carolina in 1965, the eldest of six children. After an early move to Brooklyn, he had to be bussed from the family home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood to school in the largely white area of Bensonhurst. His parents eventually took him out of high school due to bullying.
2. Before luck came his way, Chris worked as bus boy, a mental hospital orderly, and unloaded trucks for the New York Daily News, where his father also worked. Rock's zany, acerbic wise-cracking was a huge source of entertainment for his co-workers, so he duly embarked on the local comedy club circuit.
3. At 18, the young comedian was discovered by Eddie Murphy at New York's Comedy Strip. A small role in Murphy's 1987 movie, Beverly Hills Cop II became his film debut.
4. Aside from Saturday Night Live and subsequently The Chris Rock Show, which made him a household name, he produced a 2009 documentary about African-American women’s relationship with the styling of their hair, called Good Hair.
Hot stuff - with his Grammy award in February 1998
5. In light of the recent race question at Hollywood, some folks argued that 51-year-old Rock should boycott the Oscars, but his pal Ricky Gervais tweeted: “If I were @chrisrock, I wouldn’t be considering boycotting the Oscars. I’d be thinking: ‘this s*** is live. I can do some serious damage.’”
6. When he hosted the Oscar ceremony in 2005, Rock interviewed a number of African-American film-goers, none of whom had seen the best picture nominees. Many deduced from this that Hollywood was remote from his interviewees' concerns.
Rock arrives at the Academy Awards nominees luncheon in Beverly Hills in February 2005. The 77th annual Academy Awards that year was also hosted by the actor.
7. He received Grammy Awards for his spoken comedy albums Roll With the New (1997) and Bigger and Blacker (1999).
8. No slouch when it comes to being an all-rounder in Tinseltown, Rock wrote, directed and starred in the 2015 film, Top Five, in which he plays an actor trying to achieve a career in comedy while marriage to a reality TV star looms on the horizon.
9. In 1991, Rock received exceptional praise for his role in the movie New Jack City, in which a police unit successfully tackle a Harlem drug baron. Rock played Pookie, a young African-American man, locked into a cycle of drugs and violence. To prepare for the role, Rock spent many days on the streets hanging out with a Brooklyn drug addict.
10. Chris lives in a multi-million dollar home in a New Jersey, not too far from some illustrious neighbours, including Mary J Blige, Denzel Washington and Jay-Z.
Paddy Kehoe
TEN will have through the night coverage of the Oscars on our website, twitter feed and the RTÉ News Now app on Sunday into Monday.
