Bill Cosby

Cosby married Camille Hanks in 1964. Together, they had five children: Erika, Erinn, Ensa, Evin, and Ennis. In January 1997, their son Ennis was shot and killed while changing a flat tire alongside a freeway in Los Angeles. Following his death, Cosby and his wife established the Hello Friend/Ennis William Cosby Foundation to fund teachers working with students who have learning disabilities. Their daughter Ensa died in 2018.

In July 2016, Cosby's legal team announced that he had lost his eyesight and was legally blind.

Cosby was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Anna Pearl Hite and William Henry Cosby Sr. He attended Mary Channing Wister Public School, FitzSimons Junior High School, Central High School, and Germantown High School. After leaving high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1956, serving as a hospital corpsman providing physical therapy to personnel injured during the Korean War.

While in the military, Cosby earned his high school equivalency diploma. After completing his service, he attended Temple University on an athletic scholarship in 1961, participating in track and field and football. While working as a bartender in Philadelphia, he began entertaining patrons with comedic storytelling and soon started performing stand-up comedy at venues such as San Francisco's hungry i and the Gaslight Cafe in New York City.

Cosby's stand-up routines relied heavily on warm, humorous recollections of his childhood rather than political or risqué topics. Warner Bros. Records released his debut album, Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow...Right!, in 1964. Cosby won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for six consecutive years between 1965 and 1970, including for his acclaimed 1968 recording To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With.

In 1965, Cosby made television history when he was cast as Alexander Scott opposite Robert Culp in the NBC espionage series I Spy. His performance made him the first Black actor to star in a leading dramatic television role, earning him three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.

Cosby subsequently headlined The Bill Cosby Show from 1969 to 1971 and joined the original cast of the children's educational series The Electric Company in 1971. In 1972, he created, produced, and hosted the animated series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which ran until 1985. Alongside his television career, Cosby continued his formal education, receiving a master's degree in 1972 and a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree in 1976 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writing his dissertation on using Fat Albert as an elementary classroom teaching aid.

Cosby also acted in feature films during the 1970s, including Hickey & Boggs (1972), Sidney Poitier's comedies Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let's Do It Again (1975), Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), and Neil Simon's California Suite (1978).

In 1984, Cosby launched the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show, portraying obstetrician Dr. Heathcliff "Cliff" Huxtable alongside Phylicia Rashad as his attorney wife, Clair. The series focused on an affluent, stable African-American family and became an enormous commercial success, ranking as the top-rated television program in the United States from 1985 to 1989. The program's popularity earned Cosby the nickname "America's Dad."

Cosby expanded his television footprint by creating and producing the college-set spin-off series A Different World in 1987. Following the end of The Cosby Show in 1992, he starred in The Cosby Mysteries, reunited with Rashad on the CBS sitcom Cosby (1996-2000), hosted Kids Say the Darndest Things, and created the animated series Little Bill.

Cosby was also one of the most prominent advertising spokespersons in the United States, famously representing Jell-O pudding and gelatin for decades, alongside brands such as Coca-Cola, Ford, and Texas Instruments.

Beginning in the early 2000s and resurfacing widely in 2014, dozens of women came forward publicly accusing Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them in incidents dating from the 1960s to the 2000s. In 2005, Andrea Constand alleged Cosby had drugged and assaulted her in 2004; while local prosecutors initially declined to file criminal charges, Cosby settled a civil suit with Constand in 2006. Unsealed records from that litigation revealed that Cosby admitted to obtaining prescription sedatives to give to women with whom he sought to engage in sexual activity.

In December 2015, prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, charged Cosby with felony aggravated indecent assault regarding the 2004 incident with Constand. His first criminal trial in 2017 ended in a hung jury and a mistrial. In April 2018, Cosby was retried and convicted on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. In September 2018, he was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in state prison. In June 2021, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania overturned his conviction, ruling that a 2005 non-prosecution agreement with a former district attorney barred the state from bringing criminal charges.

Following his release, Cosby faced several civil lawsuits. In 2022, a California civil jury found Cosby liable for sexually assaulting Judy Huth at the Playboy Mansion in 1975 when she was 16 years old, ordering him to pay $500,000 in damages. In 2026, another civil jury awarded Donna Motsinger damages following a separate sexual assault lawsuit.