Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman: The Authority Americans Chose

He was fifty years old when he broke through, and the role that did it was a violent street pimp. Before *Street Smart* in 1987 there had been a radar repairman's stripes in the Air Force, a dancing job at the 1964 World's Fair, an uncredited walk-on in Sidney Lumet's *The Pawnbroker*, and four years on a PBS children's programme he privately loathed. The man who would go on to play God, two presidents and Nelson Mandela arrived by way of the least reassuring part available to him.

Greenwood, and the Scholarship He Turned Down

Morgan Porterfield Freeman Jr. was born on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Mamie Edna Revere, a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman Sr., a barber who died of cirrhosis in 1961. He was sent as an infant to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi, and grew up between Greenwood, Gary, Indiana, and Chicago. He made his stage debut in a school play at nine and won a statewide drama competition at twelve.

He graduated from Broad Street High School in Greenwood in 1955 and turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University. Instead he enlisted in the Air Force, serving until 1959 as an automatic tracking radar repairman and rising to airman first class. Only then did he go to Los Angeles, to the Pasadena Playhouse and theatre arts classes at Los Angeles City College.

Radar, Dance, and The Electric Company

His Off-Broadway debut came in 1967; the following year he appeared in the all-Black Broadway production of *Hello, Dolly!* with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. Then came *The Electric Company*, the PBS children's series he made from 1971 to 1975. It paid the bills and made his face nationally familiar, and the producer Joan Ganz Cooney later confirmed he "loathed" it.

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The Stage Years

The theatre is where he actually became an actor. He won a Drama Desk Award and a Clarence Derwent Award in 1978 for playing a wino in *The Mighty Gents*, and a Tony nomination with them. He took three Obie Awards — for the title role in *Coriolanus* in 1979, for *Mother Courage and Her Children* in 1980, and for Hoke Colburn in *Driving Miss Daisy*, which he played on stage from 1987 before carrying it to the screen. He also played Petruchio in *The Taming of the Shrew* at the Delacorte in 1990.

Street Smart, and the Late Arrival

*Street Smart* in 1987 cast him against everything he had done, as a violent hustler; Roger Ebert praised it and the Academy nominated him. Freeman has named it as his breakthrough. Then 1989 arrived all at once: *Glory*, *Lean on Me*, *Johnny Handsome*, and *Driving Miss Daisy*, which grossed $145 million and won him a Golden Globe and a second Oscar nomination.

He directed a feature in 1993 — *Bopha!*, about a Black policeman under apartheid — and the critic Hal Hinson wrote that "Freeman lays out the father-son dynamics with great skill and very little fuss." He founded Revelations Entertainment with Lori McCreary in 1997.

The Voice

The instrument was built, not inherited. Freeman developed it in college speech classes after concluding that most people speak too fast and too high; he deliberately dropped an octave and adopted precise enunciation. Frank Darabont cast him as Red in *The Shawshank Redemption* in 1994 specifically for that voice, despite the character being a white Irishman in Stephen King's novella — and the film became his first narration job, which opened a second career. He has since narrated *The Civil War*, *The Long Way Home*, *March of the Penguins*, Spielberg's *War of the Worlds*, *Through the Wormhole*, *The Story of God*, and *Life on Our Planet*.

Shawshank, Eastwood, and the Oscar

*Seven* in 1995 gave him a detective opposite Brad Pitt. Clint Eastwood used him repeatedly — Ned Logan in *Unforgiven* in 1992, then *Million Dollar Baby* in 2004, which finally won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and drew from Ebert praise for narration that was "flat and factual." Eastwood directed him again as Mandela in *Invictus* in 2009, a project Freeman had chased himself by acquiring the rights to John Carlin's book; it brought a fifth Oscar nomination. Christopher Nolan gave him Lucius Fox across three *Dark Knight* films.

Why Morgan Is Called a Genius

The honest framing is that this is craft, not intellect, and Freeman would likely say so first. Two things distinguish him technically. The first is the voice, and the important fact about it is that he engineered it deliberately in a classroom rather than being born with it — a young man analysing why other people's speech failed and then rebuilding his own. The second is a discipline he states plainly: "The big danger in acting is to wait for your line. That's what I never do. I always listen, no matter how many times we do it." That is the whole of his method, and it is why he can play stillness without playing emptiness. He learned it consciously, crediting Anthony Hopkins in *The Remains of the Day*: "Stillness. That's all and that's the hardest thing... that stillness becomes a radiance. I've told Hopkins that that performance was one of the great lessons for me as an actor."

The counter-case is the filmography itself. Freeman works constantly, and a large share of it is undistinguished. *Dreamcatcher* sits at 28 percent, *The Magic of Belle Isle* at 29. Peter Bradshaw noted sarcastically of *Feast of Love* that it was "great to see Freeman in a challenging role." *The A.V. Club*, reviewing *London Has Fallen*, observed that it is "possible to write garbage even in Freeman's sonorous voice." He has been typecast into wisdom, and has partly chosen it — of *Ben-Hur* he said, "I like playing power. It's something about my own personal ego." A gift so reliable that it can carry weak material is also a gift that stops demanding good material.

The Bee Farm

In 2018 CNN published accounts from eight women alleging harassment or inappropriate behaviour; Freeman apologised to "anyone who felt uncomfortable or disrespected," one named accuser publicly disputed CNN's portrayal, and the Screen Actors Guild declined to act. He earned a pilot's licence at sixty-five, converted 124 acres of his Mississippi land into a bee sanctuary in 2014, and owns a blues club in Clarksdale. He has the Kennedy Center Honors, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the SAG Life Achievement Award and the Freedom of the City of London. On retiring: "The appetite is still there. I will concede that it's dimmed a little. But not enough to make a serious difference."