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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"I got sterling reviews!" Freeman remembers. He was nominated for a Tony and won a Drama Desk Award. He soon joined Joseph Papp's maiden company of black and Hispanic actors putting on the works of Shakespeare. "We used to call it the Shaky Rep," Freeman says, cackling. "Joe had said, 'We have to find someplace where black and Hispanic actors can do the classics.' " The company eventually disbanded.

Shows opened and closed. Theater companies folded. Each time Freeman neared another port on his voyage, earning praise for an exemplary performance, he'd run aground yet again.

Then in 1986, Freeman received a script about a magazine writer who fakes a story about a pimp. "I met a pimp in Chicago one night," he recalls. "I was doing a movie with Cicely Tyson. Anyway, this pimp is needle-sharp. And he gave you the impression that anything you asked for he could provide. That image got me away from playing the pimp in the pimp hat and the pimpmobile." He played the pimp -- Fast Black -- in a chillingly quiet manner.

The movie, with Christopher Reeve in the role of the magazine writer, didn't survive in the theaters long. It earned about $1.1 million at the box office. But Freeman's performance was hard to shake for those who saw it. "That was the movie that catapulted me," he says. "And thanks to Sheila Benson -- she was head movie critic at the L.A. Times at the time -- I got an Oscar nomination."

Benson called Freeman's performance "commanding and terrifying." Others gave some credit for the nomination to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who had been familiar with Freeman's New York stage work. In her review of "Street Smart," Kael's first line asked: "Is Morgan Freeman the greatest American actor?"

The old Manhattan crowd was overjoyed at his late-blooming screen success. "Those of us in New York were now walking around as if everybody else finally knew about America's best-kept secret," Wesley says.

"Morgan was out there doing Shakespeare plays in Central Park," says Louis Gossett Jr., an Oscar winner for "An Officer and a Gentleman." "He paid his dues. He's been good a very long time."

Suddenly, Freeman was as dependable a screen presence as Spencer Tracy. Perhaps a tad too dependable. There are those who worry that, in the twilight of his career, Freeman's roles lack the edgy vitality they once had. There is the hard-to-ignore element of typecasting. "Yes, it has Morgan Freeman playing yet another Wise Old African-American Sidekick," the Star News of Wilmington, N.C., remarked about his role in the 2005 film "An Unfinished Life."

He'll soon be off to South Africa to make a movie about the 1995 Rugby Cup and the role the South African team played in the country's ongoing healing. Director Clint Eastwood wants him to play yet another good guy. "I'll be playing the great man," Freeman says about Nelson Mandela.

"As an actor," Freeman says, "you like to be well rounded. But the industry puts you in a niche. I don't think Sidney [Poitier] ever successfully played a bad part. Fonda did once in 'Once Upon a Time in the West,' but it was the only time he played a really bad guy. Gary Cooper never did. Clark Gable never did. So you're in good company when you get packaged as Mr. Good Guy. Of course, you have to be careful in thinking that's who you are in life. It's called the Othello effect. Taking the character offstage."

* * *

The voyager sails still.

Freeman got his first sailboat in the 1960s. "I'd been up in Vermont doing summer stock when a man gave me a little sailboat," he says. "I started reading a lot about the sea. Started with 'Moby Dick.' "

Sometimes there is no one around to hear the cascading Freeman voice: He's out there on the sea, all alone. He sails because he likes the challenge. "Sailing on the ocean, you have a real good shot at meeting yourself. How do you handle fear? How do you handle emergencies? Can you take care of yourself?"

He once sailed from Gloucester, Mass., back to New York. "I knew a weather system was coming up. But I left anyway. Had too much to drink the night before. Anyway, there came a point out there on the water when it seemed I was just feeling my way blindly along. But it worked out. There are times out on the water you just say, 'Whatever happens, happens. I'm in it and I'll deal with it.' "