By the mid-'80s, possible film projects were coming at Murphy from every direction, including some — from a Star Trek movie to an adaptation of August Wilson's play Fences — that would offer him the chance to stretch beyond what he'd done before. But, aside from a brief and ultimately forgettable detour into pop singing, the actor wanted to stay in his comedic comfort zone. ''I remember telling him he could play Martin Luther King or Jackie Robinson,'' says Judge Reinhold, who costarred with Murphy in the Beverly Hills Cop series. ''He would just say, 'Yeah, yeah,' and laugh.''

''I was always looking for things for him to do that would be different,'' says Katzenberg, who helped guide Murphy's career as an executive at Paramount and later at both Disney and DreamWorks. But Murphy never exhibited that urge toward the serious that has propelled comedians like Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, and Will Ferrell into dramatic roles. ''He gets great satisfaction out of doing the thing he's got a gift for, which is comedy,'' Katzenberg says. ''He's not someone who thinks the grass is greener on the other side.''

When he was safely within his comedic wheelhouse — flashing his megawatt, gap-toothed grin, letting loose the braying laugh, firing off snappy wisecracks — Murphy not only felt secure, he felt virtually infallible. ''There was a time when Eddie had had so many hits in a row, he said, 'I think I could make a movie called Fork or Spoon and people would go watch it,''' Sheffield remembers. Arsenio Hall cautioned Murphy not to be seduced by the power of his own stardom while he was working on his stand-up material for the 1987 concert film Raw: ''I said, 'You could s--- in a Dixie cup and people would laugh. You've got to make sure this material is right yourself. The audience can't be your judge.' We've all said things like that to Eddie.''

To a large extent, Murphy's arrogance was part of an act, a heightened persona befitting a decade of alpha-male stars like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Eddie Murphy who prowled the stage in a skintight purple leather suit, talking trash about Mr. T and Michael Jackson and trumpeting his sexual conquests, was a character he was playing, an outsize fantasy persona the privately introverted comic projected into the world. ''Underneath it all, there was a real person,'' says Blaustein. ''[But] sometimes you become your act. Be careful what you pretend to be, because eventually you become it.''

''The game of hits goes around and around,'' Murphy sings in a number from Dreamgirls called ''Fake Your Way to the Top.'' By the late '80s, Murphy was on top of that game, but the hits were about to dry up.