Morgan Freeman and Christopher Reeve in Street Smart
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1989
Morgan Freeman in Glory (1989)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1989
Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1989
Dan Aykroyd, Morgan Freeman, and Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1989
Morgan Freeman and Karen Malina White in Lean on Me
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1991
Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1992
Morgan Freeman in Unforgiven (1992)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1994
Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1994
Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1995
Morgan Freeman in Outbreak
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
1997
Morgan Freeman in Amistad (1997)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2000
Morgan Freeman in Under Suspicion
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2003
Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty (2003)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2003
Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty (2003)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2003
Morgan Freeman in Dreamcatcher
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2004
Morgan Freeman in Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2004
Morgan Freeman in Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2005
Morgan Freeman, Robert Redford, and Becca Gardner in An Unfinished Life
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2006
Morgan Freeman and Josh Hartnett in Lucky Number Slevin
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2006
John Cusack and Morgan Freeman in The Contract
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2007
Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2009
Morgan Freeman in Invictus (2009)
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2012
Morgan Freeman and Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2013
Morgan Freeman, Jon Turteltaub, and Jerry Ferrara in Last Vegas
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2013
Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Zoë Bell in Oblivion
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2015
Morgan Freeman and Clive Owen in Last Knights
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2017
Morgan Freeman in Just Getting Started
Gallery of Morgan Freeman
2017
Morgan Freeman in Going in Style
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Kennedy Center Honors
2008
The 2008 Kennedy Center honorees, (back-L-R) Singer Roger Daltrey, guitarist Pete Townshend, country music singer George Jones (front-L-R) dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, actor Morgan Freeman and actress/singer Barbra Streisand
Academy Awards
Freeman won an Academy Award in 2005 for Best Supporting Actor with Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Black Reel Awards
Black Reel Awards, which Freeman received in 2009 and 2015.
Golden Globe Award
Freeman won the Golden Globe for Best Actor with Driving Miss Daisy.
Cecil B. DeMille Award
Morgan Freeman won Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012.
NAACP Image Awards
Freeman is an eight-time recipient of the NAACP Image Awards.
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Freeman has four Screen Actors Guild Award (SAG) nominations, and one win for Million Dollar Baby.
AFI Life Achievement Award
Freeman received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2011.
Walter Cronkite, Joseph L. Brooks, Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson laugh together at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards held at Sardi's restaurant, New York, New York, January 24, 1988.
Morgan Freeman (L) hugs Danny DeVito during a keynote address by Intel CEO Paul Otellini on the opening day of the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show January 5, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The 2008 Kennedy Center honorees, (back-L-R) Singer Roger Daltrey, guitarist Pete Townshend, country music singer George Jones (front-L-R) dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, actor Morgan Freeman and actress/singer Barbra Streisand
NGC President Original Programming and Production, Tim Pastore, Executive Producer Lori McCreary, CEO of NGC Global Networks Courteney Monroe, Executive Producer Morgan Freeman, and Executive Producer James Younger attend National Geographic Channel's world premiere screening of 'The Story of God with Morgan Freeman,' at Jazz at Lincoln Center on March 21, 2016.
Morgan Freeman visits "The Talk," Monday, January 16, 2017 on the CBS Television Network. From left, Sheryl Underwood, Morgan Freeman, Aisha Tyler and Julie Chen, shown.
Honoree Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman attend American Film Institute's 47th Life Achievement Award honoree reception at Spago on June 05, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California.
Morgan Freeman is an American actor whose emotional depth and versatility made him one of the most respected performers of his generation. Over a career that included numerous memorable performances on stage, screen, and television, Freeman was one of the few African American actors who consistently received roles that were not specifically written for black actors.
Background
Ethnicity:
According to a DNA analysis, some of his ancestors were from Niger.
Morgan Freeman was born on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the son of Mayme Edna (née Revere), a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman, a barber. He has three older siblings. Freeman was sent as an infant to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. He moved frequently during his childhood, living in Greenwood, Mississippi; Gary, Indiana; and finally Chicago, Illinois. When Freeman was 16 years old, he almost died of pneumonia.
Education
Freeman attended Broad Street High School (nowadays Threadgill Elementary School) in Greenwood, Mississippi, graduating in 1955. He made his acting debut at age nine, playing the lead role in a school play. At age 12, he won a statewide drama competition and performed in a radio show based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Graduating from school, Freeman enlisted in the United States Air Force and served as an Automatic Tracking Radar Repairman, rising to the rank of Airman 1st Class. After four years in the military, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he took acting lessons at the Pasadena Playhouse and dancing lessons in San Francisco in the early 1960s and worked as a transcript clerk at Los Angeles City College.
Freeman received an honorary degree of Doctor of Arts and Letters from Delta State University during the school's commencement exercises on May 13, 2006. In 2013, Boston University presented him with an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
Morgan Freeman made his Broadway debut in an all-black production of Hello Dolly! in 1967. In the 1970s he continued to work on the stage and also appeared on the educational children’s television show The Electric Company as the character Easy Reader. Freeman’s performance in the film Brubaker (1980) and on the soap opera Another World (1982–84), along with several enthusiastic reviews for his theatrical work in the early 1980s, led to more challenging film roles. His portrayal of a dangerous hustler in Street Smart (1987) earned Freeman his first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. He was later nominated for a best-actor Oscar for his work in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), in which he re-created the role of Hoke after first performing it onstage. He evinced a disciplinarian principal in Lean on Me (1989), a hard-hearted Civil War soldier in Glory (1989), and an aging gunslinger in Unforgiven (1992). He made his directorial debut with the anti-apartheid film Bopha! (1993). A third Oscar nomination came for his soulful turn as a convict in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
Freeman later appeared in several crime dramas, including Seven (1995), Kiss the Girls (1997), and Along Came a Spider (2001)—the latter two based on James Patterson novels—as well as The Sum of All Fears (2002). He won an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his performance as a former boxer in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004) before appearing as Lucius Fox, a research and development guru, in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005). Freeman reprised the latter role in the sequels The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). In Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List (2007), he and Jack Nicholson played terminally ill cancer patients who make the most of their remaining time.
In 2008 Freeman returned to Broadway after nearly 20 years away from the stage, taking the role of Frank Elgin, a talented yet dispirited actor who has lost the will to perform, in The Country Girl. The following year he reteamed with Eastwood on Invictus, a drama in which he played Nelson Mandela, who sought to unite divided South Africa by supporting the national rugby team’s quest to win the 1995 World Cup. Freeman later appeared as a former CIA agent in the action comedy Red (2010), as a high-ranking U.S. politician in the thriller Olympus Has Fallen (2013) and the follow-up London Has Fallen (2016), as a post-apocalyptic survivalist in the science-fiction adventure Oblivion (2013), and as a magician who exposes the tradecraft of his confreres in Now You See Me (2013) and its 2016 sequel. He also pursued less-suspenseful fare with roles in the sentimental dramas Dolphin Tale (2011) and its sequel, Dolphin Tale 2 (2014), and in The Magic of Belle Isle (2012).
Freeman went for laughs in the buddy comedy Last Vegas (2013), in which he starred opposite Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, and Kevin Kline. He later voiced a wizard in The LEGO Movie (2014), a computer-animated adventure that featured renderings of LEGO toys as the characters and settings. His other roles in 2014 included an anti-artificial-intelligence activist in Transcendence and a psychology professor in Lucy. Freeman’s later films included the comedies Ted 2 (2015); Going in Style (2017), a remake of the 1979 film about retirees who plan a bank heist; and Just Getting Started (2017), in which two rivals at a retirement community team up to save the woman of both their affections from her kidnappers.
In a 2012 interview with TheWrap, Freeman was asked if he considered himself atheist or agnostic. He replied, "It's a hard question because as I said at the start, I think we invented God. So if I believe in God, and I do, it's because I think I'm God." Freeman later said that his experience working on The Story of God with Morgan Freeman did not change his views on religion.
Politics
Freeman endorsed Barack Obama's candidacy for the 2008 presidential election, although he stated that he would not join Obama's campaign. He narrated for The Hall of Presidents with Obama, when he was added to the exhibit. The Hall of Presidents re-opened on July 4, 2009, at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. Freeman joined President Bill Clinton, USA Bid Committee Chairman Sunil Gulati, and USMNT midfielder Landon Donovan on December 1, 2010, in Zurich for the U.S. bid committee's final presentation to FIFA for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. On day four of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Morgan Freeman provided the voiceover for the video introduction of Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
On September 19, 2017, Freeman featured in a video by the Committee to Investigate Russia group. In the video, Freeman declared "we are at war" with Russia. In April 2018, Freeman met with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
Views
In 2005, Freeman criticized the celebration of Black History Month, saying, "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history." He opined that the only way to end racism is to stop talking about it, and he noted that there is no "white history month." Freeman once said in an interview with 60 Minutes's Mike Wallace, "I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man." Freeman supported the defeated proposal to change the Mississippi state flag, which contains the Confederate battle flag. Freeman sparked controversy in 2011 when, on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight, he accused the Tea Party movement of racism.
In reaction to the death of Freddie Gray and the 2015 Baltimore protests, Freeman said he was "absolutely" supportive of the protesters. "That unrest (in Baltimore) has nothing to do with terrorism at all, except the terrorism we suffer from the police. (...) Because of the technology - everybody has a smartphone - now we can see what the police are doing. We can show the world, Look, this is what happened in that situation. So why are so many people dying in police custody? And why are they all black? And why are all the police killing them white? What is that? The police have always said, 'I feared for my safety.' Well, now we know. OK. You feared for your safety while a guy was running away from you, right?"
Quotations:
"I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history."
"Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance."
"You're going to relegate my history to a month."
"The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit."
"I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man."
"People need to start to think about the messages that they send in the movies."
"As you grow in this business, you learn how to do more with less."
"I don't get off on romantic parts. But I often think if I had had my dental work done early on, well, maybe."
"When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I'd discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater."
"But I can say that life is good to me. Has been and is good. So I think my task is to be good to it. So how do you be good to life? You live it."
Personality
Freeman loves blues. He owns and operates Ground Zero, a blues club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He formerly co-owned Madidi, a fine dining restaurant, also in Clarksdale.
Freeman is also a golf fanatic. Whenever he is shooting a movie and he isn’t needed on-set for the day, you can find him down on the links. He is actually a very skilled golfer as well, being the first American to ever score a par on the Legend Golf & Safari Resort’s Extreme 19th hole, a shot from atop a mountain with a vertical height of 430m and a 400m horizontal distance to the back of the green. Not too shabby considering that ever since a 2008 car crash paralyzed his left hand, he has golfed one-handed.
At age 65, Freeman earned a private pilot's license. He owns or has owned at least three private aircraft, including a Cessna Citation 501 jet and a Cessna 414 twin-engine prop. In 2007, he purchased an Emivest SJ30 long-range private jet and took delivery in December 2009. He is certified to fly all of them.
After becoming concerned with the decline of honeybees, Freeman decided to turn his 124-acre ranch into a sanctuary for them in July 2014, starting with 26 bee hives.
Physical Characteristics:
Morgan Freeman has a good memory, is highly intelligent, well balanced and with strong mental abilities. His thinking process is logical, and his problem solving skills are outstanding.
Freeman's height is 6 feet 2 inches (188 cm).
Interests
Sport & Clubs
golf
Music & Bands
blues
Connections
Freeman was married to Jeanette Adair Bradshaw from October 22, 1967, until November 18, 1979. He married Myrna Colley-Lee on June 16, 1984. The couple separated in December 2007. On September 15, 2010, their divorce was finalized in Mississippi.
From his early life, Freeman has two extramarital children; one of them is Alfonso Freeman. Freeman and Colley-Lee adopted Freeman's stepgranddaughter from his first marriage, E'dena Hines, and raised her together. On August 16, 2015, 33-year-old Hines was murdered in New York City.