Oprah Winfrey Helped Jamie Foxx Clean Up His Act

Oprah Winfrey can do anything—including, it turns out, help make Jamie Foxx an Oscar winner.

The actor revealed to Howard Stern on the radio host's Sirius XM show that Winfrey called him up one day and, essentially, told him to get his act together. Because, while he'd received much praise for his work in Ray (2004), Foxx was hitting the party scene pretty hard.

"You're blowing it, Jamie Foxx,'" the "Gold Digger" singer recalled, giving his best impression of the famed talk show host. "'All of this gallivanting and all this kind of s***, that's not what you want to do. ... I want to take you somewhere. Make you understand the significance of what you're doing.'"

So, Foxx said, Winfrey organized an intervention of sorts for him, arranging for a group of accomplished black actors to meet at Quincy Jones' house. "We go in the house and there are all these old actors. Black actors from the '60s and the '70s," Foxx explained. "Who look like they just want to say, 'Good luck.' They want to say, 'Don't blow it.'"

But, while meeting all of those actors in person was surely something to remember, Foxx reveals that it was meeting Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win an Oscar for Best Actor, that truly made an impact on him. "'I want to give you one thing,'" Foxx remembers Poitier saying. "I want to give you responsibility. When I saw your performance, it made me grow two inches.'"

Foxx then admits that, after speaking with Poitier, he "broke down." The group of actors then gathered around him and "made [him] understand the significance" of portraying Ray Charles—an icon who was bigger than just him, someone who everyone "could embrace."

Since then, it certainly seems like Foxx has kept focus on his career, scoring big roles in movies like Jarhead (2005), Dreamgirls (2006), and, of course, the 2013 Best Motion Picture Oscar nominee Django Unchained (2012)—in which he played the title character. He also landed a high-profile girlfriend—well, maybe. He's reportedly dating Katie Holmes, but the two have remained notoriously tight-lipped on their rumored romance.