6. THE HEAVY SHOES WERE WHAT TRANSFORMED REDD INTO FRED.
“Just as soon as I put those big heavy shoes on and walk out there, I become Sanford—but not until then, not until I put my shoes on,” Foxx said. “I can put the rest of the outfit on, but if I don’t have those shoes on, I don’t walk like him, and I don’t think like him.”
7. FRED SANFORD WAS NAMED AFTER REDD’S BROTHER.
It was the comedian’s tribute to his brother, who had died five years before the show premiered. Lamont Sanford was named after Lamont Ousley, one of the two other teenagers who made up the washtub band Foxx formed when he dropped out of high school after just one year. The character Grady Wilson (Whitman Mayo) was named after Demond Wilson, whose full name is Grady Demond Wilson.
8. FOXX BASED THE HEART ATTACKS ON HIS MOTHER.
“Fred Sanford is Mary Sanford, who is my mother, but you can reverse personalities into male or female,” Foxx told Sammy Davis Jr. on Sammy and Company. “My mother would do the same thing … she would have heart attacks when I was a kid, I remember. When she wanted something done she could hardly breathe—she had emphysema, she had cancer, she had lumbago, she had a whooping cough.”
9. LAWANDA PAGE WOULD HAVE BEEN FIRED IF IT WASN’T FOR FOXX.
LaWanda Page was the only actress Foxx wanted to play Fred’s sister-in-law, Esther. Page was too nervous to give audition producers liked, but Foxx insisted. “They were going to let me go,” Page told Jet magazine in 1977, “but Redd said, ‘No, you ain’t gonna let her go. That’s LaWanda and I know she can do it! Just give me some time with her.'”
10. RICHARD PRYOR AND PAUL MOONEY CO-WROTE TWO EPISODES.
The legendary comedians co-wrote two episodes of Sanford and Son together during the show’s second season, “The Dowry” and “Sanford and Son and Sister Makes Three.”
