actor; director
Personal Information
Born June 1, 1937, in Memphis, TN; son of Grafton Curtis and Mayme Edna (Revere) Freeman; married Jeanette Adair Bradshaw, October 22, 1967 (divorced, 1979); married Myrna Colley-Lee (a costume designer), June 16, 1984; children: Alphonse, Saifoulaye, Deena, Morgana; ten grandchildren.
Education: Attended Los Angeles City College.
Career
Actor, 1959-. Plays: The Nigger Lovers, 1967; Hello, Dolly, 1967; Jungle of Cities, 1969; Sisyphus and the Blue-Eyed Cyclops, 1975; Cockfight, 1977; The Mighty Gents, 1978; White Pelicans, 1978; Coriolanus, 1979; Julius Caesar, 1979; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1980; Buck, 1982; The Gospel at Colonus, 1983; Medea and the Doll, 1984; Driving Miss Daisy, 1987; and The Taming of the Shrew, 1990. Films: Brubaker, 1980; Eyewitness, 1980; Harry and Son, 1983; Teachers, 1984; Street Smart, 1987; Clean and Sober, 1988; Johnny Handsome, 1988; Lean on Me, 1989; Driving Miss Daisy, 1989; Glory, 1989; The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990; Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991; Unforgiven, 1992; The Shawshank Redemption, 1994; Outbreak, 1995; Seven, 1995; Moll Flanders, 1996; Chain Reaction, 1996; Kiss the Girls, 1997; Amistad, 1997; Hard Rain, 1998; Deep Impact, 1998; Hard Rain, 1998; Under Suspicion, 2000; Nurse Betty, 2000; Along Came a Spider, 2001; High Crimes, 2002; The Sum of All Fears, 2002; Levity, 2003; Dreamcatcher, 2003; Bruce Almighty, 2003; Guilt by Association, 2004; The Big Bounce, 2004; Million Dollar Baby, 2004; Danny the Dog, 2005; Batman Begins, 2005; War of the Worlds, 2005; Batman Begins, 2005; Edison, 2005; An Unfinished Life, 2005. Television: Another World; The Electric Company, 1971-75; Hollow Image, 1979; Attica, 1980; The Atlanta Child Murders, 1985; Resting Place, 1986; Flight for Life, 1987; Clinton and Nadine, 1988; The Civil War, 1990; The Promised Land, 1995; Slavery and the Making of America, 2005. Directed Bopha!, 1993. Produced Mutiny, , 1999; Under Suspicion, , 2000; Along Came a Spider, , 2001; Levity, , 2003. Military: U.S. Air Force, 1955-59.
Life's Work
Morgan Freeman is a versatile actor who has performed in numerous roles from children's television to Shakespearean drama. He is best known for his appearances in a string of well-regarded motion pictures, including Driving Miss Daisy,, Lean on Me, Glory, and Million Dollar Baby. The latter won him an Academy Award in 2005 for best supporting actor. Freeman has won several other awards and award nominations. Time correspondent Janice C. Simpson said Freemans performances "are so finely calibrated that [the] characters emerge as men of true heft and substance." Freeman, a private man who says acting "comes easy" for him, does not care for the movie star label and all that it implies. The actor observed in Ebony that "once you become a movie star, people come to see you. You don't have to act anymore. And, to me, that's a danger."
The big screen has brought Freeman to a wider audience, but he has long been a figure in New York theater, appearing only in Broadway and off-Broadway plays that suit his very particular tastes. As early as 1967 he held a part in the Broadway cast of Hello, Dolly, that starred Pearl Bailey, but the bulk of his work has come in nonmusical, intensely serious dramas that relate various aspects of the African-American experience. "I have a special affinity for seeing to it that our history is told," Freeman said in Ebony. "The black legacy is as noble, is as heroic, is as filled with adventure and conquest and discovery as anybody else's. It's just that nobody knows it."
Freeman endured a tumultuous childhood, and he prefers not to reveal much in interviews about his early years. The fourth child in the family, he was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1937. While still an infant, he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. She died when Freeman was six years old, and he spent the next several years traveling with his mother from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee, and finally to Greenwood, Mississippi, where they settled down.
Like most youngsters of his generation, Freeman loved the movies. "When I was a kid, it cost 12 cents to go to the movies," he related in a People interview with Susan Toepfer. "If you could find a milk bottle, you could sell it for a nickel. Soda and beer bottles were worth 2 cents. If you were diligent, you could come up with movie money every day." The World War II-era films Freeman saw inspired him to be a fighter pilot. At first, drama served mainly as a pastime until he could enter the armed services.
Freeman's acting hobby began in junior high school. He was trying to gain the attention of a girl named Barbara by pulling her chair out from beneath her. His teacher grabbed him and took him to a room where they were preparing for a drama tournament. Freeman recalled to New York, "Well, we do this play 'bout a family with a wounded son just home from the war--I play his kid brother. We win the district championship, we win the state championship, and dadgummit, I'm chosen as best actor. All 'cause I pull this chair out from under Barbara."
Freeman's tale shows that he exhibited talent early but did not take acting seriously, even when others recognized his skill. After graduating from high school in Greenwood he entered the U.S. Air Force, hoping to become a pilot. Aptitude tests showed that he had the ability, but he was instead assigned duties as a mechanic and a radar technician. "I was aced out," he explained in Esquire. "Racism, the southern old-boy network. I had a sergeant who interposed himself between me and the casual barracks [stockade]--I was insolent. I called a horse's ass a horse's ass, even if it was wearin' brass. The whole thing in the service, you're supposed to look down. Never could do that," he added.
Freeman spent his spare time while in the Air Force contemplating other careers, and he ultimately decided to become an actor. He left the service in 1959 and headed straight for Hollywood. Once there, he looked up the address of Paramount Studios in the telephone book and went over to apply for a job. Only when he noticed that the questions on the application concerned familiarity with office machinery and typing did it dawn upon him that he would not be hired as an actor on the spot. He opted to follow a more conventional route, taking acting classes at Los Angeles City College while supporting himself as a clerk. He also took dancing lessons, becoming good enough to land a part-time job performing at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.
By his own admission, Freeman did not gain much insight from his acting classes. "I'm not much for talking about acting," he noted in New York. "I've been called an intuitive actor, and I guess that's right. I go with what I feel. It doesn't do me any good to intellectualize about it," he continued. Freeman moved to New York in the early 1960s and supported himself with a series of day jobs while auditioning for theatrical roles. At one point he even served as a counter man in a Penn Station doughnut stand. His first important part came in an off-Broadway play called The Nigger- Lovers, which opened and closed quickly in 1967.
Freeman's brief experience in The Nigger- Lovers, was valuable, however, because it helped him land a role in the all-black cast of Hello, Dolly, that opened on Broadway in 1967. When the show closed, he moved on to a series of off-Broadway and repertory plays in New York and elsewhere. In 1971 he was cast in The Electric Company, a television series produced by the Public Broadcasting System. On the air for five years, the educational show was aimed at school-aged children, and Freeman played a hip character called Easy Reader. The actor commented in People that he is still remembered for his role. "It's like being known as Captain Kangaroo," he said. "It irks me when I meet people who are parents now who talk about how they grew up with me.
Freeman drew his first major awards for his role in the play The Mighty Gents,, produced at New York's Ambassador Theatre in 1978. Even though he won the Clarence Derwent Award, Drama Desk Award, and earned a Tony Award nomination, the play closed in nine days and Freeman was out of work. For a while he found himself scuffling for jobs. This experience taught him that awards do not guarantee success, and he has been decidedly indifferent about them ever since. Even when he won his Oscar in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby, his acceptance speech was brief.
The New York Shakespeare Festival ultimately proved fertile ground for Freeman. There he appeared as the lead in Coriolanus in 1979 and had principal roles in Julius Caesar and Mother Courage and Her Children. His work in Coriolanus and Mother Courageearned him yet more awards, this time Obies. The breakthrough play for Freeman was The Gospel at Colonus, first performed in 1983. The musical, based on the ancient Greek drama about Oedipus--a mythical character who kills his father and marries his mother--is set in a modern Pentecostal church. The Gospel at Colonus featured Freeman as the preacher, a charismatic Oedipus figure around which the frenzied action revolved. Freeman won yet another Obie Award as best actor in a drama, and the play eventually moved to Broadway in 1988 with Freeman still in the lead.
Freeman's success with the New York Shakespeare Festival helped him to land a starring role in the stage play Driving Miss Daisy, for which he won an additional Obie Award. The drama examines the close friendship that develops between a wealthy Jewish widow and her black chauffeur, Hoke, in the post-Civil War South. By the time he appeared in Driving Miss Daisy, on stage, Freeman had also earned several film roles, most notably in the Robert Redford vehicle Brubaker and Harry and Son, starring Paul Newman. And because of Driving Miss Daisys success in the theater, Freeman was eager to portray Hoke in a film version.
The actor almost missed his chance. In 1987 he took the part of a near-psychotic pimp in the movie Street Smart. Although the film was a box-office flop, Freeman's powerful performance earned him an Academy Award nomination. "Street Smart essentially serves as a backdrop for Freeman's tour de force performance," Anthony DeCurtis wrote in Rolling Stone. "As the Yoo-Hoo-swilling Fast Black, he alternates fierceness with irresistible charm, engaging intelligence with a bone-chilling capacity for evil. He is the epitome of knowingness. The stage director of Driving Miss Daisy admitted that he never would have hired Freeman to play Hoke had he seen the actor as the menacing Fast Black first.
Freeman's portrayal in the violent Street Smart, however, did not deter the makers of the critically acclaimed 1989 film version of Driving Miss Daisy from casting him in his original role of the kind-hearted Hoke. Once again Freeman was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor. That year he took another important role, this time as a grave digger-turned-soldier in the Civil War epic Glory.. The film, a poignant drama about an all-black regiment that was chosen to lead an assault on a Southern fort, received much praise and provided Freeman just the sort of work he relished. "I've been offered Black quasi-heroes who get hanged at the end," he said in Essence.. "I won't do a part like that. If I do a hero, he's going to live to the end of the movie." Freeman's character in Glory,--eventually promoted and decorated--is indeed one of the last fighters to die as his battalion storms the fort.
Noted for his subtle but scathing critiques of negative representations of African Americans on stage and in films, Freeman chooses his roles carefully. After ending the 1980s with a hectic spate of film and stage work, he took a brief breather before accepting work on a new project. Cast as Petruchio in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of The Taming of the Shrew in 1990, Freeman generated lavish reviews, and he subsequently appeared as Azeem, a Moor, in the 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves . Robin Hood opened to mixed reviews. It was labeled a politically correct film.
Freeman received another Academy award nomination for his portrayal of a prisoner, in The Shawshank Redemption. He also made his debut as a director in Bopha! with Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard, but told Jerry Roberts of Variety, "... For directing, you've got to really enjoy it. It's time-consuming and it's not lucrative. Call me an actor who has directed."
Freeman also turned in standout performances in such films as Outbreak, Unforgiven, and Deep Impact. He also had an important role in Amistad , a historically-based film about slavery-bound Africans who revolted and fought for their freedom all the way to the Supreme Court. Freeman was given his first starring vehicle, Kiss The Girls, and another film, Seven, was his first top-grossing film. Known for playing good guys and everyday Joes, he portrayed the villain in Chain Reaction and Hard Rain. Freeman told Morgan Dean of WRIC-TV that he was "looking for characters to play and looking to have fun playing. I'm not drawn to any certain characters at all. I like playing what's eclectic."
In 2004, Freeman starred in The Big Bounce, an adaptation of a book by Elmore Leonard. His best year came in 2005, when he won his Oscar for Million Dollar Baby. Freeman played Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris, an ex-fighter who helps trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) develop waitress Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) thrive in the ring. Swank won best actress, Eastwood best director and the film itself took best picture. Freeman also earned an Image Award from the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Success has allowed Freeman to indulge himself at length in his favorite hobby--sailing. One of his acquisitions is a 38-foot sailboat that he has piloted through the Caribbean and the North Atlantic. "When you live in the world of make-believe, you need something real," he remarked in Time. "I go sailing, I'm in the real world." Freeman is often accompanied on his trips by his second wife, costume designer Myrna Colley-Lee, and one of his seven grandchildren, E'Dena Hines.
When not working, Freeman can also be found on his 44-acre farm in Mississippi. He does not see himself as a star. "As you work, you realize that stardom is really not what you want. You want steadiness," he told the Associated Press in Jet.. "Steady work is better than stardom. And for a character actor, stardom is anathema because once you become a star, it becomes you." Being one the best character actors in show business, Morgan Freeman no longer needs to worry about steady work.
Awards
Clarence Derwent Award, Drama Desk Award, and Antoinette Perry Award nomination, 1978, The Mighty Gents; , Obie Award, 1987, for stage version of Driving Miss Daisy; , NYC Film Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Film Critics Award, Golden Globe nomination, and Academy Award nomination, 1987, Street Smart; , Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination, 1989, Driving Miss Daisy; Academy Award nomination for The Shawshank Redemption, , 1994; Academy Award winner for best supporting actor for Million Dollar Baby, 2005; Image Award, NAACP, for Million Dollar Baby, 2005.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- Ebony, April 1990.
- Entertainment Weekly, October 22, 1993.
- Esquire, June 1988.
- Essence, December 1988.
- Jet, March 6, 1989; October 16, 1995.
- New York, March 14, 1988.
- People, April 4, 1988.
- Rolling Stone, May 5, 1988.
- Time, January 8, 1990.
- Variety, September 1, 1997.
- Village Voice, July 24, 1990.
Online- Hollywood Reporter, www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/awards/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846796 (March 22, 2005).
- Internet Movie Database, Morgan Freeman profile, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000151/(November 17, 2005).
- New York Times, movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=284681 (January 29, 2004).
- OSCAR.com, www.oscars.com (March 8, 2005).
Other- Information was also obtained online at the IAC Institute and www.wric.com/morganint.html
— Mark Kram and Ashyia N. Henderson
