Kennedy Center Honors: Morgan Freeman

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The Kennedy Center Honors: Morgan Freeman

A look at the career of the esteemed actor, one of the receipients of the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors.

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He was born in Memphis during the era of segregation. The Freeman family moved back and forth between Mississippi and Tennessee. Freeman attended high school in Greenwood, Miss. Teachers heard the distinctive voice and introduced him to school drama productions. He gained some notice and performed on a few radio shows. Jackson State University dangled some scholarship money his way to come join its drama program, but he enlisted in the Air Force instead. Mississippi owned a lot of nightmares and he wanted out. "Thought Mississippi was the worst place on Earth for a black man," he says.

When he got out, he bounced between the East and West coasts. America changed; Mississippi evolved. And then he fell in love with what he had left behind. He resides these days for the most part in Charleston, Miss., a small town not far from the Tennessee border. He's become defensive about home. "Last I heard, the last lynching was in Texas," he says, referring to the 1998 James Byrd Jr. murder.

He's sitting in a small room at the private Ridgeway Country Club, a swank, rustic facility on the edge of Memphis. A lovely golf course lies beyond the window. He sometimes plays here.

Slowly -- and with a bit of a grimace -- he lifts a glass of iced tea. Freeman was in a highly publicized car accident last August on a road in Mississippi. Authorities ruled out drug or alcohol involvement. Surgery was required on his left arm and it remains bandaged. "Had some nerve damage," the 71-year-old actor says. A 48-year-old female friend was also injured in the crash. In the aftermath, Freeman's lawyer said that the actor and his wife of 24 years were separated and planning to divorce. Freeman did not want to talk about his marital life.

After leaving the Air Force, Freeman settled in San Francisco and got a job at the post office. He managed to save "a little stake" and decided to take off for New York City. The early '60s were churning. Possibilities seemed endless.

In Manhattan, he worked at a series of odd jobs. "Once I got a job as a skip tracer with a clothing manufacturer. They make clothes and send them off to places like Macy's. If the clothes didn't show up, I had to trace them."

He began reading for roles at Manhattan theater companies. It was a joyful time: actors chasing their dreams, sharing food, auditioning. "What I did we called 'dungeon theater' -- it wasn't even off-Broadway," he says.

Freeman liked the brew of actors and writers sitting around in small apartments from Harlem to Greenwich Village, talking about plays and doing workshops. "There was all this equal employment opportunity money coming into New York City, money for cultural stuff. You had John Lindsay as the mayor and he cared about these kinds of things. Theater groups were everywhere. You'd find yourself sitting in a room with writers like Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones -- he became Amiri Baraka -- and Richard Wesley. And you could make just enough money with these small roles to keep yourself alive."

Wesley now chairs the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University. On the phone from Singapore where NYU has a similar program, he remembers those early New York City days with Freeman: "Morgan always had this ability to disappear into roles," Wesley says. "Those of us who had the distinct privilege to watch him as a stage actor never forgot it. We feel blessed." Wesley says others wondered why it was taking Freeman so long to break out. "But I never heard him complain. I think he appreciated that other actors admired his work."

Freeman found steady work in 1971 on "The Electric Company," a PBS reading show geared toward children. The eclectic cast of actors engaged in a lot of improvisation. The kids giggled up a storm. "I began to think then I had a future," he says about the job.

In late 1976, Freeman went into rehearsals for a play that would eventually open on Broadway in 1978. It was Richard Wesley's "The Mighty Gents." Freeman played a former gang member in his 30s who was dealing with the vicissitudes of life. The play closed after nine performances. But a kind of Freeman cult emerged from it: It was the play everyone talked about but not enough people had gone to see.