Dr. William Henry Cosby, Jr.is an African-American actor and comedian. His sitcom, The Cosby Show was very successful, and notable for being one of the first to star a well-to-do middle-class African-American family. During the 1980s, Cosby was among the highest paid entertainers in the United States. His popularity has diminished somewhat in recent years, and his reputation has suffered due to allegations of sexual harassment, but overall Cosby remains an icon of popular culture.

He joined the United States Navy in tenth grade and completed high school through correspondence courses. Later, he won an athletic scholarship to Temple University. After working as a bartender for several years, he began his career as a stand-up comic, winning fame for his performances and a series of record albums beginning in 1963. As a comedian, Cosby told stories rather than jokes. His breakout routine as an imagined conversation between God and a skeptical Noah, but Cosby found his richest vein of humor in his Philadelphia childhood, particularly in tales about his friends Fat Albert, Cosby's brother Russell, and Old Weird Harold.

TV producer Sheldon Leonard landed Cosby a break-out television role in I Spy (1965), the first time an African-American actor starred in a weekly dramatic television series. Cosby won two Emmy Awards for his portrayal of an undercover CIA agent.

Cosby then appeared in a series of shows named after himself: The Bill Cosby Show, The New Bill Cosby Show, the animated Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Cos, The Cosby Show, The Cosby Mysteries, and Cosby (based upon the British series One Foot In The Grave). He has producer, writer, director and even composer credits on many of his projects.

Bill Cosby was a regular on the Captain Kangaroo show in the 1980s, presenting the "Picture Pages" segment which was later syndicated on its own.

He won several Grammy awards for comedy albums, had a top forty song ("Little Old Man") in 1969, and sang on a number of albums. He won more Grammies for comedy than any other artist, winning every year from 1965 to 1970 and again in 1987. As of 2005, he had 3 gold- and 6 platinum-certified comedy albums. He has also written several humorous books about different aspects of life, based on his stand-up comedy such as Fatherhood and Love and Marriage. In fact, Fatherhood and Time Flies were the best selling non-fiction hardback books of 1986 and 1987, respectively.

Cosby has also made occasional forays into film acting, but the critical and popular success which came so abundantly to his stage and television work has not blessed his movie performances: his natural charisma has often been undermined by mediocre scripts in films like The Devil and Max Devlin (1981) and Ghost Dad (1990), and the notorious flop Leonard Part 6 (1987), although his work in ensemble casts in Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do it Again, a pair of productions headed up by Sidney Poitier in the mid-1970s, received favorable reviews.