Amazing African-American Actors by Jeff C. Young

Author:Jeff C. Young [Young, Jeff C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4645-0941-4
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Image Credit: Mary Evans/© 2004 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved/Ronald Grant/courtesy Everett Collection

Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in a scene from Million Dollar Baby

“After that, my acting career just took off,” Freeman would later recall.4

Roles followed in both Broadway and regional theater productions. But it was a recurring role in a children’s television show that gave him steady employment and financial stability for the next few years. In 1971, Freeman began playing a disc jockey named Easy Reader on the PBS show The Electric Company.

The show ran for five years, but Freeman got tired of playing the role. He started drinking heavily and developed ulcers. Freeman was also having marital problems, and he divorced his first wife in 1979.

Returning to stage revived Freeman’s acting career. He started getting good roles that earned him critical acclaim and prestigious awards. In the play The Mighty Gents (1978), his portrayal of Zeke, a broken-down alcoholic, earned him a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination. Two years later, he won an Obie Award for his performances in two plays, Mother Courage and Her Children and a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Freeman’s success as a stage actor attracted the attention of movie producers. His role as Fast Black, a ruthless and sadistic pimp in the film Street Smart (1987), won him the first of four Academy Award nominations. Three years later, he was nominated again for recreating an Obie Award–winning role he had played onstage—Hoke Colburn, a modest, down to earth chauffeur—in Driving Miss Daisy. Once again, he was denied an Academy Award, but the role won him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.

His third Academy Award nomination came for playing prison inmate “Red” Redding in The Shawshank Redemption. Freeman’s restrained performance as the veteran convict who befriends the falsely convicted Tim Robbins also won him nominations for the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

In 2004, Freeman gave the performance that earned him the Academy Award that had eluded him for so many years. In Million Dollar Baby he played an aging ex-boxer, Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris, who mentors a determined woman boxer played by Hilary Swank. Critic Roger Ebert called the film “a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true.”5 While taking note of Freeman’s fine acting, Ebert also praised his work in narrating the film: “The voice is flat and factual: You never hear Scrap going for an affect or putting a spin on his words. He just wants to tell us what happened.”6

Well into his seventies, Freeman has won practically every major screen and stage acting award. But no matter how many awards he wins, Freeman still firmly believes that acting is more important than stardom. He continues to look for roles where he can play interesting and memorable characters.

“I like character roles,” Freeman acknowledges. “Somewhere back there I really came to the conclusion in my mind that the difference between acting and stardom was major. And that if you become a star, people are going to go to see you.

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