PHILADELPHIA — Sometimes when Terrence Howard talks, he sounds like a Southern preacher, even if he does mix metaphors. The words roll off his tongue with a hint of Deep South origins — not his own Cleveland upbringing — when he philosophizes about what brought him to this point in his 36 years of life. Certainly little was left to chance, although much was a result of circumstance.

"It's hard for a chicken to break out of its shell," he says. "But someday I may become an eagle and soar."

He's ready to soar, all right. His flight began Friday with the opening of "Hustle & Flow," the movie certain to make him a star.

Considering the impact he's already made in "Crash," playing a television director who has to cope with prejudice in contemporary Los Angeles, he's got quite a wingspread.

In "Hustle & Flow," the audience award-winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Howard plays DJay, a Memphis pimp and drug dealer tired of his dead-end life. Inspired by the success of a local rapper, he thinks he can write a rap song that will provide him with a way out.

People are going to remember Howard's name, not to mention his distinctive hazel eyes. "They're my daddy's eyes," the suburban Philadelphia resident says.

But it was Howard's mother who was his inspiration for the role. She raised Howard and his three siblings while trying to audition for acting roles.

"She would come home disappointed and she'd pour all of that into me," Howard recalls. "I think she was like DJay, holding on to her dreams but wondering how she was going to fulfill them."

All told, Howard has 10 brothers and sisters from his parents' various marriages. When he was 16, Howard and his siblings moved in with his father.

"We couldn't even wash up because all the pipes were frozen," he says of their dilapidated home. "We had a pot and we heated up water in it just so we could wash our faces and go to school in the morning.

"I've had a tough life," he says. "I think the bags under my eyes and the twisted metacarpals on my hands tell that story."

The character of DJay, he says, "was someone I knew."

An example: "I conned my way into college," Howard says, citing a 1.6 high-school grade-point average. "I went to the admissions office and told them my transcripts were coming from Los Angeles, but couldn't we get the process going? Then I asked them for funding and they sent me to the scholarship office. The scholarship office asked for my transcripts and I told them, 'The admissions office has them, but can't we get the process going?' "

Once in school at New York's Pratt Institute, he soon got the process going on his acting interests.

"I like science — science and life and understanding — but when I was studying, I tried acting one day and it clicked," he says.

Howard and his wife divorced when he got the role in "Hustle & Flow," but have since remarried. Watching three hours of hardcore porn to prepare for his role didn't help with his family life, and the actor says he "had to lend myself to the movie for two years. There were a lot of emotional aspects to my life, and it's easier, as an actor, accepting someone else's life.

"So many times people said I was going to make it and every time I didn't, I became a little more paranoid and harsher than I should be at times because I'm scared," Howard says. "The environment I grew up in in the inner city and the pressure is terrible. People are stuck in a confined area with limited resources, and there's a lot of aggression.

"But if you have a kind nature in your heart, you can survive," he continues. "DJay grew up in that environment and he showed a great amount of moral courage to leave what he's known and be willing to get better.

"Every person has heart, some more than others. You look in other people's eyes and hope they won't hate you, that they'll see past your faults," Howard says.

"You know what I feel like? I feel like a guy who's watching the drawing of the Super Lotto for $131 million and I've got all four numbers they called and I'm just waiting for the other two."