'When I was growing up in Terrell, Texas,' Jamie Foxx, 37, says, 'I felt this was not where I was supposed to be. I knew that I was meant for a different destination.'

Jamie Foxx is referring to the Southern town where he lived with endemic racism, poverty, and the corrosive knowledge of having been abandoned shortly after birth.

Last year, in Hollywood, he received Academy Award nominations for his performances as the singer Ray Charles in Ray and his supporting role, opposite Tom Cruise, in Collateral. Thus he became the second man in history, after Al Pacino, to earn Oscar nominations for roles in two pictures in the same year, winning best actor for Ray.

He has just finished his 17th movie, Jarhead, Sam Mendes's adventure drama about the first Gulf war.

Despite his success, little in Foxx's journey to stardom was easy. For starters, when he was seven months old his birth mother handed him to her adoptive parents, Estelle and Mark Talley, then walked away. The Talleys took him in and reared him as their own son, although they were already in their sixties. 'For whatever reason, my biological parents didn't want to make the effort,' Foxx says. 'Legally, my mother is my sister, because the lady who adopted her in turn adopted me.'

Unsurprisingly, Foxx, born Eric Bishop, has little contact with his birth mother, Louise Annette Bishop, 62, or his biological father, Darrell Bishop (aka Shahid Abdula), 63, reportedly a sometime stockbroker and convert to Islam. Foxx believes his father will only talk to him if he converts to Islam, something he is not going to do. 'Although it's too late now, I still ask myself why they didn't want me,' Foxx says. 'Maybe they weren't ready to raise a child. Was it too inconvenient? I lived just up the street from them. I'll never understand it, because I know how great it feels to have a child love you back.' Foxx has an 11-year-old daughter, Corinne, born out of wedlock, to whom he is devoted.

'I realise the effort you have to make. Raising a child ain't going to be easy, but if I was to lose the relationship with my daughter, it would be really destructive for me.'

Foxx grew up in the Talleys' small yellow house on Bradford Street in the black quarter of Terrell, a racially segregated community with a population of 13,000, 30 miles east of Dallas. Terrell is a railroad junction and trade centre for cotton farming. The town was established shortly after slavery was outlawed in Texas following the defeat of the Confederacy in the civil war. Like the rest of Texas, Terrell continued to subject blacks to unequal treatment through legal segregation, Jim Crow statutes, and the infamous Terrell election laws, which, along with the poll tax and Ku Klux Klan terror, effectively disenfranchised them. While Foxx remembers the racism, he also claims memories of his grandparents' home as a safe place where hard work, self-discipline and learning were valued, and he was surrounded with books and music. 'My grandmother was my protector,' he says. 'She did battle for me. She said, 'This boy's special. He's got something.' There was no question that I was their son. I always felt loved there.'

The Talleys worked as gardener and housemaid for white families living on the other side of the railroad tracks. 'My grandmother had to take a lot of disrespect,' he recalls. 'They'd call her at all hours and say, 'Get over here!' It used to burn me up. They'd call my grandfather, when he was 79, at five in the morning and say, 'We need you here!' I hated that. I decided that won't be me. No, not that. Not me.'

At the age of five, Foxx began taking weekly piano lessons from the Dallas music teacher Lanita C Hodge, and practising piano for 30 minutes a day on his grandmother's orders. 'Grandmother was tough,' he says. 'She was determined. She was a devout Christian, but she'd cuss like a sailor. Granny said, 'I paid good money for that piano - and you're going to play it!' And I did. She told me music would take me where I needed to go. 'You can go anywhere in the world and play music and folks are going to love it.'

'Sometimes, when the weekends came and everybody was going to an amusement park or outside playing,' he continues, 'I didn't want to go in the house and practise or take my piano lesson. My grandmother could be mean, man. It was fisticuffs. And then she'd call in the enforcer, my grandfather, Mark, like calling a baseball pitcher in from the bullpen. He'd come in and say, 'What's the problem?' I'd say, 'Problem? There ain't no problem! What was I thinking?' And I'd go take my lesson.

'Granny said music gives discipline. She said, 'Can you handle 30 minutes' practise every day? Music gives structure. It helps your reading and memory.' It did all that for me. My memory is impeccable, almost photographic. Music was the means to everything.'

Among the earliest benefits music brought him was money. As a young teen, Foxx worked as part-time pianist and choir leader at Terrell's New Hope Baptist Church for $75 a week. His grandmother saved his wages. Being on the church staff brought him under the special scrutiny of the elders. 'It was the Bible Belt,' he says. 'It was different from kids growing up today. There was a lot of stuff we weren't meant to do. I got caught dancing when I was 13.