Movies

Cuba Mark Gooding Jr. (born January 2, 1968) is an American actor. He is the recipient of an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Emmy nomination.

After his breakthrough role as Tre Styles in Boyz n the Hood (1991), he appeared in A Few Good Men (1992), The Tuskegee Airmen (1995), Outbreak (1995), and Jerry Maguire (1996), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

He gained later fame for his roles in Men of Honor (2000) as Carl Brashear, and in Michael Bay's World War II epic Pearl Harbor (2001) as Doris Miller. His other films include As Good as It Gets (1997), What Dreams May Come (1998), Rat Race (2001), The Fighting Temptations (2003), American Gangster (2007), Gifted Hands (2009) as Ben Carson, Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013), and Selma (2014) as civil rights attorney Fred Gray. He also provided the voice of Buck the Horse in the animated feature film Home on the Range (2004).

In 2016, he portrayed O. J. Simpson in the FX drama series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, receiving a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie, and co-starred in the sixth season of the FX anthology series American Horror Story, subtitled Roanoke.

Early life
Gooding was born on January 2, 1968, in the Bronx, New York City. His mother, Shirley Sullivan, is a singer, and his father, Cuba Gooding Sr., was the lead vocalist of soul group The Main Ingredient. Gooding has three siblings: April, Omar, and Thomas. His paternal grandfather, Dudley MacDonald Gooding, was a native of Barbados. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1972 after his father's music group had their hit single "Everybody Plays the Fool"; two years later, the elder Gooding left the family. Gooding himself was raised by his mother and attended four different high schools: North Hollywood High School, Tustin High School, Apple Valley High School, and John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills in Los Angeles. He served as class president in three of them. He became a born-again Christian at the age of 13.