Born & Raised:

Full name: Tyrese Darnell Gibson.
Born: Dec. 30, 1978 in south Los Angeles. Raised in the Watts area of Los Angeles.

Early Life:

Tyrese Gibson was born in south Los Angeles (formerly known as South-Central Los Angeles), an inner-city area notorious for its crime and drug use. Tyrese has three older siblings. His father left the family in 1983 and his mother Priscilla raised the kids as a single parent.

Tyrese was a talented youngster who loved to both sing and rap, and was a member of a local rap group called Triple Impact, going by the name Black-Ty. But his first major success came not as a singer or rapper, but as an actor who could sing. In 1994, when he was 16, he appeared - and briefly sang - in a Coca-Cola commercial.

Modeling & Singing:

2007)A year later in 1995, when Tyrese was 17, he was hired to model clothing made by the Tommy Hilfiger label. Eventually he won a recording contract with music label RCA and his self-titled debut album was released in 1998, led by the hit lead single "Sweet Lady." The video for the song featured Tyrese on a bus, partially as a nod to the Coca-Cola commercial that had launched his career a few years earlier. The album Tyrese went on to sell over a million copies in the U.S. and to this day remains his biggest hit album of his singing career.

Branching Out:

Before he was 21 years old, Tyrese was a successful model, singer and MTV VJ, but he didn't stop there.

He also branched out more into acting, and in 2001 released his second album, 2000 Watts, and also had the starring role in the movie Baby Boy. In Baby Boy he played an immature man named Jody, a role that was originally meant for rapper-actor Tupac Shakur before his murder. Throughout the 2000s, Tyrese has balanced singing and acting; to date he has released four albums, plus had major roles in half a dozen films, including 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and Transformers (2007).

TGT:

In 2006, Tyrese went back to his hip-hop roots for a double-album called Alter Ego. One CD is all R&B songs, the other features him rapping as his alter-ego, Black-Ty. In 2007, he parted ways with his label J Records, and became an independent artist. Also in 2007 he and fellow sex-symbol singers Ginuwine and Tank formed an R&B supergroup called TGT (Tyrese, Ginuwine, Tank). By mid-2008, the group had recorded a few songs, but ultimately, the project went nowhere due to record label politics and the artists' busy schedules.

Notable Quote:

"I don't really know of anybody who does the amount of things that I've done and had the success at it. It's because I get bored easy and I always try to figure out a way to stay stimulated and accomplish one thing after the other." -- Tyrese Gibson to pr.com, December, 2006.

Discography:

2011: Open Invitation.
2006: Alter Ego.
2002: I Wanna Go There.
2001: 2000 Watts.
1998: Tyrese.