Morgan Freeman

Actor

• Born: June 1, 1937
• Place of Birth: Memphis, Tennessee

A prolific actor known for imbuing his characters with dignity and gravitas, Freeman obliges audiences to reevaluate their perceptions of race and identity. His acclaimed film and stage roles consistently broke from and challenged the stereotypes frequently assigned to African Americans in the entertainment industry.

Early Life

Morgan Porterfield Freeman, Jr., was born on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee. When he was two years old, his parents left for Chicago as part of the Great Migration, leaving Freeman and his sister, Iris, in the care of his paternal grandmother in Greenwood, Mississippi. When she died in 1943, the children moved to join their parents in Chicago. After their father’s death, they lived for several years in both Illinois and Mississippi.

Freeman’s attraction to the stage first surfaced when he was cast as Little Boy Blue in an elementary school play. At age twelve, he won a statewide acting competition. Freeman graduated from Greenwood High School in 1955 and entered the US Air Force, in which he served for four years as a radar mechanic. After his discharge in 1959, he moved to California and found a job at Los Angeles City College, where he took classes in voice, acting, and diction, augmented by dance instruction in San Francisco.

In 1967, Freeman married Jeanette Bradshaw; they divorced in 1979. In 1984, he married Myrna Colley-Lee; the two separated in 2007 and divorced in 2010. Freeman has two children, one of whom is the actor Alfonso Freeman; he and Colley-Lee also adopted and raised Freeman's granddaughter Edena Hines, who was murdered in 2015.

Life’s Work

Freeman’s formal career onstage began with his 1964 move to New York after several years of travel between the coasts and a dance appearance at the 1962 World’s Fair. He made his stage debut in 1967 in an Off-Broadway production of The Nigger Lovers (based on the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement), followed later that year by a Broadway role in an all-black production of Hello, Dolly! Freeman also appeared as the character Easy Reader on the popular public television show The Electric Company from 1971 to 1976.

In the 1980s, Freeman began to receive critical recognition for his deft stage interpretations of complex characters such as the chaplain in Ntozake Shange’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. He won Obie Awards in 1980 for his performance in the title role in Coriolanus and in 1984 for his work as the preacher in The Gospel at Colonus.

In 1987, Freeman starred in the film Street Smart as the gritty and complicated Times Square pimp Fast Black and was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor. However, it was his third Obie Award later that year (for his role as a dignified chauffeur for an aging southern Jewish widow in Driving Miss Daisy) that showcased the blend of talents that would become Freeman’s distinctive style.

Driving Miss Daisy was brought to the screen in 1989, with Freeman reprising his role as Hoke Colburn. He was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor. That year also saw him appear in African American history epic Glory and play an activist principal in Lean on Me. In 1990, he returned to the stage to play Petruchio in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Taming of the Shrew.

Freeman added directing to his credentials in 1993 with the feature film Bopha!, which examined the life of a South African policeman under the apartheid regime. In 1997, he founded Revelations Entertainment. His interweaving of theater and film continued into the twenty-first century, making him one of the most visible members of the American acting community. He won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in 2005 for his role as the former boxer Eddie DuPris in Million Dollar Baby (2004).

After trying unsuccessfully to get film rights to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), Freeman worked with Clint Eastwood (who had directed him in Million Dollar Baby) to bring the story of South Africa’s victory in the 1995 World Cup to the screen in the 2009 film Invictus. Freeman received another Academy Award nomination for his performance as Mandela in the film.

In mid-2010, he returned to educational television with the science documentary program Through the Wormhole (2010–2017) on the Science Channel. He continued to work regularly well into his old age, appearing in a variety of films. He played a minor role in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, before costarring as Allan Trumbull in the action thriller Olympus Has Fallen, costarring in the science fiction Oblivion, and appearing as Thaddeus Bradley in the crime thriller Now You See Me, about a team of magicians who pull bank heists during their acts, in 2013. He later lent his voice to the animated family film The Lego Movie (2014), had a recurring role in the television drama Madam Secretary from 2015 to 2017, and played a small role in Disney's The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018). Freeman also reprised his previous roles of Bradley in Now You See Me 2 (2016) and Trumbull in London Has Fallen (2016) and Angel Has Fallen (2019). In 2019, Freeman costarred as a crime boss in the mystery thriller The Poison Rose, about a former football player who becomes a private investigator.

Freeman next starred alongside Robert De Niro and Zach Braff in the crime comedy film The Comeback Trail, a remake of the 1982 film of the same title. The film first premiered in 2020 at the Monte-Carlo Film Festival. In 2021, Freeman appeared as himself in the comedy film Coming 2 America, a sequel to Coming to America (1988) led by actor and comedian Eddie Murphy. In 2022 and 2023, Freeman again lent his voice to narrate educational documentaries for the streaming service Netflix, for Our Universe and Life on Our Planet, respectively. In November 2022, Freeman appeared in the opening ceremony of that year's Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, which took place in Qatar. Freeman's participation in the opening ceremony sparked controversy among fans, several of whom had criticized FIFA's choice to host the World Cup in Qatar due to various human rights issues in the country.

In recognition of his achievements in acting, in 2012 Freeman received the Cecil B DeMille Award, the Golden Globes Awards' honor for lifetime of achievement on screen. In September 2016, he was awarded a National Medal of the Arts by President Barack Obama. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in 2017.

In 2018, Freeman was accused of sexual harassment on movie sets and during interviews by eight women. Shortly after, Freeman issued an apology, stating that he did not mean to offend or make anyone uncomfortable with his words or actions. In response to the allegations, the SAG reviewed whether to take action against Freeman; they confirmed that he would keep with Lifetime Achievement Award later that year. Other sponsors, however, removed Freeman and his voice from their commercials.

Significance

Freeman’s diverse and innovative ways of portraying African American characters on screen and stage helped combat the idea that black actors were suited only to certain types of roles. He also was part of a move toward accurately presenting aspects of black history that had been marginalized or omitted from mainstream education. Issues such as the presence of black abolitionists in the colonial era in Amistad (1997), the controversial formation of the first African American regiment in the Union Army in Glory, and the complex realities of ruling post-apartheid South Africa in Invictus were given clear and cogent form by Freeman. His work across all major entertainment genres reflects an ability to intuitively become each character so totally as to make the audience forget race and color.

Bibliography

Deb, Sopan. "Screen Actors Guild Lets Morgan Freeman Keep Achievement Award." The New York Times, 6 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/arts/morgan-freeman-sag-aftra.html. Accessed 30 Jan. 2020.

Di Placedo, Dani. "Morgan Freeman Sparks Backlash after Leading Qatar World Cup Opening Ceremony." Forbes, 21 Nov. 2022, www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2022/11/21/morgan-freeman-sparks-backlash-after-leading-qatar-world-cup-opening-ceremony. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024.

Freeman, Morgan. “Morgan Freeman’s Resistance and Non-Traditional Roles.” Interview by Glenda E. Gill. No Surrender! No Retreat! African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater. St. Martin’s, 2000.

Freeman, Morgan. "Morgan Freeman on '60s NYC, Bigotry, and Why God Looks Like Him." Interview by Nate Jones. Vulture, New York Media, 8 May 2015, www.vulture.com/2015/05/morgan-freeman-on-60s-nyc-bigotry-and-god.html. Accessed 23 Sept. 2015.

Tracy, Kathleen. Morgan Freeman: A Biography. Barricade, 2006.

Whitaker, Charles. “Is Morgan Freeman America’s Greatest Actor?” Ebony, vol. 45, no. 6, 1990, pp. 32–34.