Jamie Foxx, the actor portraying Ray Charles in the movie Ray, never had the relationship with his father that he wanted. His biological parents lived 28 miles away in Dallas, Texas, but rarely visited or noted his achievements.

“I passed for more than 1,000 yards, the first quarterback at my high school to do that,” says Foxx. “I was making the Dallas Morning News, and my father never came down. That’s weird. Even to this day—, nothing… but that absence made me angry. It made me want to be something. I said, I’m going to make you look up one day and say, ‘That’s my son’.”