Jamie Foxx now refers to his eldest daughter, Corinne Foxx, as “Michael Corleone” after she took charge of his stroke recovery.
“When you look at The Godfather and Michael Corleone is out with his girl on Christmas, he picks up the newspaper and sees that his father has been shot, and he says, ‘It doesn’t say if he’s alive,’ and he’s not really telling his girl what he’s reading,” Jamie, 58, said through tears on the Tuesday, August 25, episode of the “Baby, It’s Keke Palmer” podcast. “Michael Corleone left and he went to that hospital, and he took over. He told one of the guys, ‘There were people coming here to do danger to my father. I need you to help me.’ That’s who she was.”
Jamie was hospitalized in April 2023, later revealing that he suffered a brain bleed that led to a stroke. Throughout his health scare, Corinne, 32, dropped everything to help her dad. (Jamie shares Corinne with ex Connie Kline and 17-year-old daughter Anelise with ex Kristin Grannis. He is currently expecting a baby with his girlfriend, Alyce Huckstepp.)
“When I talked to the doctor, I said, ‘Hey, listen. I hear everybody’s stories. I want to know from you what it was,’” Jamie recalled. “He said, ‘Hey man, without her, you wouldn’t be here.’ So I said, ‘Hey, that’s Michael Corleone forever.’”
He continued, “The doctor was like, ‘No one handles it like this … because you were on the slab, TMZ, all these different [people were asking for details], and she handled it.’”
When speaking with Jamie about the health scare, the doctor further stated that Corinne “saved [his] life.”
“He said, ‘She’s the reason that you’re here,’” Jamie stated, before addressing his daughter directly. “I mean, you had to deal with a lot of stuff. She had to deal with the internet.”
While Corinne was “laser-focused” on her father’s recovery, she admittedly “was not prepared” to share the news online.
“I had never been on the bad side of the internet, but as soon as he went dark, the internet was scary … with the cloning and the conspiracy [theories],” Corinne recalled. “I just wanted to be like, ‘It’s not that interesting actually, what it is is a human thing.’ It also was not my place to ever release his medical information, and so, I had never really experienced that before.”
She added, “The toughest part was just trying to manage that, but it didn’t really matter. They can say whatever they want, as long as he’s good.”
