Morgan Freeman Posters and Movies

About Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman


Morgan Freeman was born on June 1, 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee. The youngest of five children born to barber Morgan Porterfield Freeman, Sr. and schoolteacher Mayme Edna, Freeman was raised in Chicago and Mississippi in a low-income home. Not long after he was born, Morgan's parents, like so many other African-Americans struggling, relocated to Chicago to find work. While his parents looked for jobs, Freeman remained with his maternal grandmother in Charlestown, Mississippi.

At the age of six, Freeman's grandmother died and he moved north to be with his mother, who had already separated from her alcoholic husband. More moves followed, to Tennessee and eventually back to Mississippi, where Mayme Edna settled her family in Greenwood.

As a kid, Freeman spent a good portion of his time scraping together enough money to see movies, where he formed an early admiration for actors like Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, and Sidney Poitier. It was by chance that Freeman himself got into acting. He was in junior high school and, as punishment for pulling out a chair from underneath a girl he had a crush on, Freeman was ordered to participate in the school's drama competition. To his surprise, and probably school administrators, he proved to be an immediate natural on the stage, taking top honors in the program.

But while Freeman loved to act, he became interested in flying. After graduating high school in 1955, Morgan turned down a partial drama scholarship and joined the U.S. Air Force. The military proved to be much different than what he'd expected. Instead of darting around the skies, Freeman's job was a radar technician and mechanic.

In 1959, Freeman left the Air Force and tried his fortunes out West, moving to Hollywood to see if he could make it as an actor. It wasn't an easy life. He took acting classes and struggled to find work. In the early 1960s, he moved again, this time to New York City, where more petty day jobs and nighttime auditions followed.
In 1967, the same year he married Jeanette Adair Bradshaw, Freeman's big career break came when he landed a part in an all African-American Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! starring Pearl Bailey. Freeman also performed in an off-Broadway production of The Nigger Lovers.

Some national exposure followed in 1971, when he started appearing regularly on The Electric Company, a public television-produced children's TV show that focused on teaching kids how to read. On a show that included such current and future stars as Rita Moreno, Joan Rivers and Gene Wilder Freeman had some of the show's more memorable characters, like "Easy Reader," "Mel Mounds," and "Count Dracula."

Television proved to be a grueling and demanding life for Freeman. Despite some stage work, including a Tony-nominated performance in The Mighty Gents in the late 1970s, Freeman couldn't seem to break into movies like he wanted. When The Electric Company was canceled in 1976, Freeman saw himself in a career that was far from grounded. His personal life was hurting, too. Long before the show ended, Freeman found that his marriage had started to fall apart, and he began drinking too much. Freeman and Jeanette divorced in 1979.

A year after his divorce, Freeman's career caught a break when he landed a part as a crazed inmate in the Robert Redford film, Brubaker (1980). However, the steady stream of film work he hoped would follow did not materialize, and Freeman was forced to retreat back to television for two hard years on the cast of the soap opera Another World.

In 1987, Freeman's fortunes changed when he was cast in the film Street Smart, which placed the actor on the screen as the volatile pimp Fast Black. The role proved to be huge success for Freeman, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Film critic Pauline Kael even went so far as to ask out loud, "Is Morgan Freeman the greatest American actor?" Two years later, Freeman earned more acclaim—and a second Oscar nomination—as the kind-hearted but stubborn chauffeur in 1989's Driving Miss Daisy. By the 1990s, Freeman was starring in such big budget films as 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, Seven (1995) and Deep Impact (1998).

In 2005, Freeman won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. And in 2008, he again landed the role as Lucius Fox in Batman Begins (2005) for the blockbuster sequel The Dark Knight.

Freeman's eloquent, distinctive voice has also made him a natural for narration. His voice can be heard on such memorable films as War of the Worlds and the Academy Award-winning documentary March of the Penguins. His voice can be heard on several documentaries also. In 1997, Freeman co-founded the movie production company Revelations Entertainment, including its online movie distribution company, ClickStar.

While Freeman's personal life has experienced a bit of turbulence in recent years—he and his second wife, Myrna, split in 2007, and he was in a near-fatal car accident in Charlestown, Mississippi—the actor shows no signs of slowing down.