Morgan Freeman: The Latecomer

Morgan Freeman, the man considered by many to be the best actor working on-screen today, didn't break through until the age of 50, and is now about to turn 60. Here he talks about dealing with gangs as a kid, having an epiphany in a T-33 Jet Trainer, starving on the streets of Los Angeles, and using his late-life success to tell his part of American history.

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Like Duke Ellington with his orchestra, pretending to be startled by the sweetness of his own music, Morgan Freeman is presiding at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, humorously nagging his retinue because, he says, he suspects they are secretly turning down the heat. He prefers the heat kept high, and like anyone about to turn 60 (in June) who has thoroughly made it, he has every intention of being comfortable and having a proper grand time in a place like this hotel. Hasn't he earned it? Without a trace of boastfulness, he knows he's at his peak--feels it, like Ellington feeling the beat behind him. He doesn't take his success for granted as something bound to last, but he is perpetually entertained that his own simple, yet vast love of pretending, of doing what he calls "a bit of a skit," has taken him so far. His eminence delights him all the more because he sees the streak of absurdity in it.

A lot of people are calling Morgan Freeman the best actor in America (this began with Pauline Kael, back in '87 when Street Smart was released). Who rivals him for grace, dignity and authority? At six-foot-two he has a dancer's figure still. He moves and talks and reacts like someone born for movies--ideally the movies of the '40s and '50s, the ones he saw as a kid, when he looked on the wondrous world of white stories and loved it, without resentment or anger, and knew he deserved it. But getting there was a long journey.

Freeman gazes out the windows of his suite at the misty, damp day and sees his own past, a day that was one of his first in this city. Los Angeles: the late '50s; a young man right out of the Air Force, looking for roles and believing in movies like an idiot. "I didn't know what I was doing, or how impossible it was," he remembers. "I just asked for parts." On the day he's thinking of now, he says, "I was walking, and I hadn't eaten for three days. I remember realizing, and saying to myself, 'Why, you could die right here.'"

Freeman spent not just years, but decades as someone unsure of where work would come from. When he finally got a steady gig doing kid TV on The Electric Company, the undemanding acting came to bore him so much he started drinking and found he was an alcoholic. He was barely holding together when Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were becoming the great American actors. The sheer passage of time has to be underlined in Freeman's career not just to point to his persistence, but as a measure of his humor and fatalism--and as the backdrop to the absolute serenity of being Morgan Freeman now.

Freeman has always wanted to be where he is now. But it wasn't until '86 and '87 that he "arrived," with the stunning double act of Driving Miss Daisy onstage and Street Smart _(for which he was Oscar-nominated) on-screen. In just over a decade since then, he has done _Clean and Sober, Lean on Me, Johnny Handsome, Driving Miss Daisy (the movie), Glory, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Power of One, Unforgiven, Bopha! (which he directed), The Shawshank Redemption, Outbreak, Se7en, Moll Flanders and Chain Reaction. His new film, The Flood, is about to open; Kiss the Girls is upcoming; and he's about to begin work on Steven Spielberg's Amistad. He has earned a special reputation for performances that gently guide young, white actors--Brad Pitt in Se7en, Robin Wright in Moll Flanders, Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction and Christian Slater in The Flood. He is more than in demand; he's been booked solid for several years.

So now he has this suite at the Four Seasons, filled with his own cheerful retinue, and he's announcing the debut of his own production company, Revelations Entertainment, which plans to make a big sci-fi movie out of the Arthur C. Clarke novel, Rendezvous With Rama. He is cashing in, in a deft, good-natured, totally American way. If Morgan Freeman has come to be famous and revered late in life, this means that we, his audience, never knew the Morgan Freeman who was young, foolish, impetuous--a jerk, a punk. He grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi, near where he lives now with his wife, designer Myrna Colley-Lee, but he grew up partly in Chicago, too. The lessons he learned from these two different ways of growing up mean everything to him.

"Is Morgan Freeman your real name?"

"Yeah, it was my father's name."

"Where does the 'Morgan' come from?"

"No idea."

"It's a Welsh name, isn't it?"

"Never been able to find out anything at all about that. I don't know why he was named 'Freeman.' I know some of the background of that side of the family, but the strange thing about the black family tree is that usually you can follow only the mother's line. I know that my grandfather's name was Hubert Freeman. He was married for a while to my grandmother, and then she was living with another man. She had three sons. Looking at them, I get the distinct impression they were from three different fathers. But one never knows. I wasn't old enough to ask the questions. Later, I had a very strong need to know, so I know that my great-great-great grandmother was a Virginia slave who was bought up by a man named Colonel Wright and taken to the territory of Mississippi, and who had three sons, one of whom was the father of my great-grandmother, [who was born] out of wedlock--he didn't acknowledge her. Her I knew. She lived till I was four years old, but I avoided her because she was that old, sick woman, doomed and dying for the longest time."

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