Eddie Murphy has achieved his dream: “I couldn’t wait to get famous”. Starting out as a stand-up comedian he moved into acting and became one of Hollywood’s top box office leading men. Almost every movie Eddie stars in becomes an instant hit.

You might say that comedy was in Eddie’s blood. Born on April 3, 1961 in Brooklyn, New York, his dad, New York City policeman Charles Murphy, was an amateur comedian. His mother Lillian, was a telephone operator. It wasn’t long before Eddie’s life began changing for the worse. His mom and dad weren’t getting along and they divorced when Eddie was 3 years old. Five years later, they heard the news that Eddie’s father had died. After that the little family, Eddie, his mom and older brother, Charles, had a really hard time. They struggled financially and it was during this time that his mother was hospitalized for a long period of time.

Eddie Murphy’s experience in foster care was a short, but very important part of his life. He was just eight years old when he and his brother were sent to a foster home because of his mother’s illness. Although he stayed in foster care for just about one year, he credits the experience with helping him develop a sense of humor and making him realize how important it is to find something to laugh about in every situation. Murphy and his older brother Charles were put in the care of a woman whom Eddie calls “a kind of black Nazi”. “Those were baaaaaad days. Staying with her was probably the reason I became a comedian.”

When Eddie was nine, his mother remarried and the family was reunited and moved to Long Island, New York. Eddie spent a lot of time watching TV and soon began imitating what he was watching. He did imitations of cartoon characters, such as Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. “My mother says I never talked in my own voice—always cartoon characters. Dudley DoRight, Bullwinkle. I used to do Sylvester the Cat (‘thufferin’thuccotash’) all the time.”

Eddie didn’t care much about school. He was studying, but not what his teachers had in mind. Developing his comedy skills was what Eddie wanted to do and he used school to try out his jokes. He worked on his routines after classes, and in high school became an expert at “ranking”(a form of witty insults). Eddie Murphy was the class clown and was voted “most popular” in his high school. When a teacher showed disapproval about his joking around, Eddie answered back, “I’m going to be bigger than Bob Hope”.

At age 15, Eddie hosted a youth center talent show, and was a big hit with the audience. “Looking out to the audience, I knew that it was show biz for the rest of my life.”4 Soon Eddie was doing comedy in some clubs around town. He was earning between $25 and $50 a night at nightclubs (where he was too young to use alcohol). It’s no wonder that his schoolwork was suffering. Instead of doing homework after school, he would be trying out his routines on his classmates. “My focus was my comedy”.

Eventually it caught up with Eddie and he flunked 10th grade. “As vain as I was, I don’t have to tell you what that did to me. Well, I went to summer school, to night school, I doubled up non classes, and I graduated only a couple of months late.” In his yearbook, Murphy declared his career plans: comedian. Here is the quote he put in the yearbook: “In reality, all men are sculptors, constantly shipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create a masterpiece.”

After high school, Eddie enrolled at community college mostly to please his mother, but he continued appearing at local clubs. Eventually he began appearing on the Manhattan comedy circuit where he learned that NBC-TV’s Saturday Night Live was looking for a black cast member. After six tries, he earned a spot as an “extra” and went on to a regular position. He emerged as one of the most popular members of the SNL cast ever with his popular impersonations of boxer Muhammad Ali, actor and comedian Bill Cosby, musician Stevie Wonder, Jerry Lewis and more. Eddie’s stand-up routines were street-smart with plenty of youthful arrogance, irreverent and ingenious, full of impish good cheer and peppered with four-letter words. Unlike others entertainers of that period, however, Eddie Murphy has always believed in clean living. He avoids alcohol, tobacco and drugs. He told Barbara Walters: “I’m funny without narcotics. I don’t have to sniff cocaine to be funny.”

In 1982, Murphy’s album of his stand-up routines received a Grammy nomination and eventually went gold. The same year, he got his first motion picture role in the comedy hit 48HRS which was an instant hit, then followed up with a starring role in Trading Places. Both popular movies ended up among the top ten grossing films of 1983. These early successes were followed up by films which some fans found disappointing, but Eddie’s talent and drive have served to help him weather the ups and downs of his career. A recent role as a manic donkey in the animated fairy-tale spoof Shrek has delighted young and old audiences alike and the family comedy Daddy Day Care features Eddie as an overwhelmed father.

In 1993 Murphy married model Nicole Mitchell. The couple has four children together.