Morgan Freeman: the pimp who became God
How does a Broadway lowlife get to heaven? Morgan Freeman talks about his journey from obscurity to Hollywood elder statesman — and taking on the role of Nelson Mandela
by Nicola Graydon
The air in Memphis is so humid you could drink it. It’s trying to rain but that doesn’t deter Morgan Freeman from practising his golf swing. I’m under a canopy watching Will, the coach, give him a master class at Southwind golf club. It’s all about the hands and the hips (he’s stiff around the hips, apparently). He claims to be protecting a torn muscle in his back, but Will isn’t giving him a break. “I know you like a challenge,” he says. Freeman is all elegance in grey slacks, a pistachio-green shirt and a snappy white panama hat. “My work isn’t work,” he says, with a grin. “In that sense I’m to the manor born. It’s easy. Now this,” he brandishes his club, “this is work.” He’s only been playing golf for nine months but, according to his coach, he’s better than some who’ve been playing for years.
It’s difficult to imagine that this is a man who turned 70 in June. While I’m immobile and wilting in the heat, he hits one ball after the other while his coach prods his hips and adjusts his shoulders. Two hours later he’s as fresh as a daisy, and as we adjourn to the bar he orders a double vodka on the rocks with two fat olives.
So what’s his elixir? “Well,” he says in an accent more Southern than expected, but with the familiar timbre that rolls into the brain receptors like good brandy, “for a start, I got good genes from my mother. She was 89 when she died but she could have lived much longer than that. She told me she just got tired of it all and wanted to go.
“And I’ve never been very good with rules, so I do things a little differently. Now some people start to behave in certain ways just because they think they should because they’ve reached a certain age. You know, they get out the rocking chair, slow down. Now why would I want to slow down when I feel like I’m just getting started?”
Freeman is a self-confessed late developer. He was nearly 50 before he really cracked it on the screen in 1987, with a fierce portrayal of a pimp in Street Smart, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. He says he’d wanted to act since he was 13, and apart from a stint in the air force when he decided to be a fighter pilot, he never wanted to do anything else. Were there moments when he lost faith? “Oh God, yes,” he says, groaning at the memory. “For instance, I’d started getting a name for myself. I’d done a couple of Broadway musicals, I’d been a part of The Electric Company, so my name started to have some recognition. Then, in December 1981, I finished a play on Broadway and the phone just stopped ringing. I started to think I should look for other options to pay the rent, but the landlord was wonderful. I’d phone and say, ‘Nothing’s coming in,’ and he would say, ‘As long as you keep in contact, I know you’re good for it.’ ” The drought lasted for two years, only to be broken by Othello in Texas. “And I was awful,” he admits. “One of the worst things I’ve ever done – but it was work.”
His career lull continued for five more years. He thinks it might have been because he’d got himself a reputation. He relates three anecdotes, not in any particular order. “I was up for a role in a TV series of The Odd Couple. I know,” he raises his eyebrows at me, “why go there? In the audition I asked them if they had new scripts. They said, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘Let me get this straight, you are doing The Odd Couple but with blackface.’ They looked at me, looked at each other and said, ‘Well, yes.’ I told them I wasn’t interested.”
Then he auditioned for The Thing, a sci-fi set in the Antarctic. “There were eight scientists and three supporting roles – a cook, a driver and a radio operator. They were all black and the scientists were all white. I pointed that out and said I wasn’t interested.” At another audition he recalls that the director asked him to “do it blacker”. “Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous as that? What is blacker? Has anyone been asked to ‘do it whiter’? I don’t know for sure, but I think they started to think I was trouble.”
Then, in 1987, he landed the role of Fast Black in Street Smart. To watch it again is to be re-introduced to a very different Morgan Freeman and to realise what a brilliant chameleon he is. Fast Black is as far from his patrician image as it’s possible to get. And he remains the actor’s favourite character. He recalls the audition for the role that brought on the thaw: “I was sitting outside the audition and I could hear all the other actors screaming and yelling. Now, I was living high up on the Upper West Side in New York, so I knew pimps, and I knew that pimps never yell. They talk very, very quietly. So I went in there and…” then he leaps to his feet and steps towards me. “And I grabbed her hair like this…” he grabs my hair and pulls my head backwards and puts his two fingers under my eyes and says, “which eye, the left or the right,” in the most un-Freeman-like tones.
It’s terrifying and intoxicating at the same time. Mostly, Freeman is still as a salamander in the sun. Only his eyes are moving. He’s watching, listening, aware of the slightest movements around him shaping every nuance. Then, when he’s ready, he pounces to devastating effect.
He goes back to his seat, grinning. “So I got it. And I absolutely loved every minute of it. But I told them, ‘I’m not wearing any scrappy old hat or cheap shoes,’ so the costume designer took me to Saks and spent most of the budget kitting me out in Armani.” I tell him I loved the gold tooth. “That was all me.” Then the roles started pouring in. It’s like an honour roll of iconic American cinema: Lean on Me, Driving Miss Daisy, Glory, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Unforgiven, The Shawshank Redemption, Amistad, Se7en, Million Dollar Baby. “You know how it is. It’s like money. If you have it, it’s easy to get it.”
There’s little in Freeman’s background that suggests the seeds of greatness. His father was an alcoholic who died in 1961 at 47 from cirrhosis of the liver, and he saw his mother struggle to make ends meet with a variety of men who, as he puts it, were “simple respites from grinding poverty”.
“My mother was a rolling stone,” he says affectionately. “There were five of us – from four different fathers.
She didn’t necessarily make good choices there.” He had
no relationship with his father. “I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me very much either.”
Is this a reason why he gravitates towards these benign fatherly roles – even pushing it to the heavenly father himself in Bruce Almighty and now Evan Almighty? “Maybe, but it hasn’t necessarily made me a good father. You know, Henry Fonda became that role in American cinema, the patrician father figure, but he wasn’t a good parent. I mean, my kids love me, but it could just be because I’m rich.” He laughs, but he’s only half-joking.
As a child he was shunted from grandparent to grandparent, city to city. His maternal grandmother died from pneumonia when he was six, so he was sent back to his mother in Chicago where she was working as a cleaner. “That was my first slap in the face,” he recalls. “I got off the train in December, and that wind was the unfriendliest thing I’d ever encountered.” He only lived in the Windy City for a few years before returning to the warm South.
In America in the 1950s his dreams of being an actor must have seemed like crazy talk. Did his mother ever try to dissuade him? He slowly shakes his head and, bringing his wrists together, his palms outwards, he mimes her gently shepherding her middle son out into the sun. “She promised to send me to Hollywood, but in the end I took her. To the Golden Globes on the red carpet.” So you were her star child? He nods. “Guess you could say I was, yes.”
And his enormous pride at this fact is, you sense, not because of his success but because of what he brought to her after years of thankless struggle that culminated in a final pregnancy when he was 12 years old, with another man who was gone before she could begin to contemplate how she was going to do it all over again. “It was traumatic, very stressful.” And now his elbows are on his knees and I’m looking at the crown of his panama hat with a golf tee tucked jauntily into the band. He’s talking so quietly, my tape recorder barely registers over the air conditioning. He starts to tell her story. “Her parents, my grandparents, were doing well. He was a tailor, and he had a store in downtown Memphis. They were light-skinned, almost middle-class, going places. She was their only child. And then they had a fire. My grandfather tried to rescue his clients’ clothes and all his bolts of cloth, so he kept going back in. He went completely blind soon afterwards. So then my grandmother had to go out to work. My mother stayed home with her blind father. She was just six years old.”
“So that explains the rolling stone,” I say after a long pause. He looks up finally. “Yep, that about explains it.”
Both of us are a bit stumped by this unexpected emotion. It’s as if he’s reliving the pain he felt as a boy watching his mother struggle. But you sense that her absolute confidence in him is a decisive element of his character. For despite, or maybe because, of this precarious childhood, Freeman gives off an air of invincibility; a man absolutely in control of his destiny and untroubled by self-doubt. As he says, he was born to do this. And by this, he means all of this: the acting, the iconic roles, the fame, the money, the yacht, the plane, this life. He’s the embodiment of Tom Robbins’s maxim: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
When not on location, Freeman disappears to his 120-acre ranch near Charleston, Mississippi, where he lives with his wife, the costume designer Myrna Colley-Lee, and thoroughbred horses that he rides every day. Golf has taken over somewhat, but one of his great pleasures remains sailing the Caribbean in his boat, a fine-boned Shannon 43, although work has kept him on land for a couple of years.
“I learnt to sail in 1967, so it was with me long before I was successful,” he says, when I ask if sailing is an antidote to Hollywood. “Sailing in the deep ocean is a life challenge. You go out there and you meet yourself. It can’t be avoided. So you get a pretty good idea of your courage and your humanity. Who are you? What are your capabilities? What is the limit of your commitment? You learn these things.”
It was his love of the ocean that brought him to Grenada, the southernmost of the Caribbean’s Windward Islands and one of the least developed, where he now has a house,
and which became a place of respite during the late 1990s. “I loved it because it was a much simpler place than some of the other islands. Of course, they want the place to be discovered by tourism and I’d much rather it stayed as it is.”
Five years ago – at an age when the rest of us are getting our free bus pass – he learnt to fly, and now he flies his Cessna to film sets all over the US. He’s waiting for a plane that can fly across the Atlantic. “Two things I don’t do,” he grins. “I don’t do cold and I don’t fly commercial.”
With all this he should be smug or arrogant or aloof or something unpleasant, but he’s none of those things. Everyone who works with him says a film set is a happier, calmer place when he’s around. Nobody can imagine anyone else working in Hollywood today who could possibly carry off playing God. Earlier, over a breakfast of southern grits, he asks me what I want to talk about. I say I’m here to find out how he’s managed to rise above the Hollywood fray and foster such an impeccable reputation after so long in show business. He chuckles wickedly:
“You know, I was hanging out with Sidney Poitier and we were trying to decide if he or I were the better actor.
We decided it was me as I convinced the world I could sing.” His 1968 Broadway debut was in Hello, Dolly!
Then he spends at least some of the interview disabusing me of any notions of his imminent canonisation. So, what’s your vice, he asks when we chat briefly about Se7en. “Oh, vanity, I suppose, with a smidgen of sloth,” I confess. “What’s yours?” He looks at me with a wolfish grin and a playfulness pulling at the corner of his eyes. “Lust.”
I wonder if his own saintly reputation has become something of a yoke; if he’s looking for something to express a darker side. He confesses it’s difficult to break out of the Freeman mould. “I loved playing Fast Black. He was so bad he was good. The greatest joy of acting is that you can be any number of people, so I’m looking for something off the beaten track, something outside the regular thing that people expect me to be doing. But it’s not easy to find.”
For now, he’s most looking forward to tarnishing the halo of another saintly icon, Nelson Mandela, in a film he’s producing as well as starring in. Rumours about Freeman playing the former South African president have been swirling around Hollywood for years. The pair have become firm friends since Freeman bought the rights to Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. “We made an agreement that whenever we were in the same continent we would try and get together, so I’ve spent some good times with him, which is an incredible privilege.”
“We’ve been waiting for a decent script,” he says about the imminent film, “but nobody could adapt the autobiography; it was probably too ambitious in scope, in any case. Now this,” he smiles broadly, “this script is brilliant, very powerful.” It’s based on The Human Factor: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Changed the World, by veteran journalist John Carlin. It focuses on Mandela’s first year in office, pivoting on his appearance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, when he wore a Springbok rugby jersey – a symbol of white power – reassuring the whites in the race-riven country that he was a genuine peacemaker.
“It focuses on Mandela the human being,” says Freeman, “not Madiba the hero. Mandela may be beloved around the world, but as far as he’s concerned he failed his mother, his wives and his children. We’re going to be looking at what is going on beneath the surface, the man behind the image.”
Meanwhile, the man behind Freeman’s image is edgier, angrier and sexier in the flesh. He’s also taller and lankier than expected, with legs that go on for ever. When I ask about the difference between acting on stage and in film he says: “Grounding. On stage it is rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. You peel back the character like an onion, revealing deeper aspects. Take Coriolanus, for example. I realised some way into rehearsal that the mother adored her warrior-general son; that when he walked through the door with all his wounds and scars she’d get wet she was so excited by it. The wife was totally peripheral. It was all about his mother. I realised that it had this whole incest element going on.”
He’s leaning forward and, like with his impression of Fast Black, he’s lost all his laconic Southern charm; his body is taut, burning with an inner fire that combusts when this talk of empires and war inevitably leads to talk about Iraq. “It’s a tragedy for this country,” he says furiously. “I knew there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction by reading Newsweek, so how come the politicians didn’t know? Nothing so much as moved without us knowing about it.
I can’t believe that we were dragged into this thing because of the motivations of just two or three individuals. Bush and Cheney, of course. What I can’t understand is Tony Blair and Colin Powell. These are intelligent men. What were they doing? Powell must have known he was holding up a vial full of nothing at the UN. And Tony Blair? What was he thinking?” He’s genuinely baffled and very angry.
“You know those mothers of the marines, they’re so proud of their sons, in uniform, fighting for their country, until they come back in a box, or crazy or maimed for life –because you can be sure it will be one of those three things.”
“We are looking at a case of colossal national stupidity right now. How did we wind up with a president who claims not to read? How did that happen? We’re in a very unfortunate situation that should be a grist for national anger, but we don’t seem to be doing anything about it.”
I ask if he has ever thought about going into politics. He looks at me in horror. “I’ve never been attracted to politics because it’s about lying,” he says, vehemently. “Acting is the opposite: you pretend to be someone else, but you are doing it to reveal the truth about something or someone.”
Despite his desire to find a role like Fast Black to give his acting a darker range, Freeman is still investing in films that benefit humanity. His production company, Revelations Entertainment, which he founded in 1997, has as its motto “to enlighten, express heart and glorify the human experience”, and his most memorable roles achieve one or all of those things: Principal Joe Clark in Lean on Me; Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy; Sergeant Major Joe Rawlins in Glory; Judge Leonard White in The Bonfire of the Vanities; Ned Logan in Unforgiven; and Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in The Shawshank Redemption. Nonetheless, he claims never to have made a conscious decision to seek out movies with a moral centre. “I gravitated towards them instinctively,” he says. “I was brought up on movies where the hero was the hero. There was no ambiguity about it. Crime never paid.”
He hopes Revelation might achieve a legacy of films with those values. “Somewhere in my youth I learnt an awful lot from the movies – they are the best teachers because they get your attention. So you see a movie about the Lewis and Clark expeditions, or Ben Hur or El Cid, and without realising it you are learning something about history. There’s a lot of history, of American history, that has not been told, and I think if you have the option to do it, then you have an obligation to do it.”
For this reason he cites Glory, the heroic story of the first all-black volunteer regiment in the civil war, as one of his most important movie experiences. “Here was a historical moment that might have been lost had it not been for Ed Zwick resurrecting it for the screen.” I mention Amistad as the only mainstream historical film about slavery, and he corrects me: “Amistad was not about slavery,” he says, “it was about the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. Slavery as a trade had already been outlawed, so these people had been kidnapped. We need to clear up some stuff about slavery. We look on the US as the culprit, but all they were doing was taking advantage of cheap labour. Slavery existed in Africa for hundreds of years. We did not go in there and capture people; they were kidnapped by African and Arab slavers. It would be a good thing to finally take that stigma off ourselves.”
To my naive English ear, this sounds like sacrilege coming from an African-American, but I’m beginning to realise that Freeman is more iconoclast than icon and he resolutely refuses to let racism be an issue, despite his early experiences that might have tainted his view. America, he says, is not as racist as it thinks it is. He tells a story of a long discussion he had with a Cambodian film-maker. “She said to me, ‘You know what you have in America? You have a mild case of racial intolerance. We had racial hatred in Cambodia. It was there in Rwanda, and you have it in Darfur.’ That put things into perspective for me.”
Certainly, Freeman’s formidable success would justify this conviction, but still I wonder if it’s more to do with his singular sense of who he is. His first performance on stage was when he was eight years old, and he admits that several teachers recognised, and encouraged, his talent and he really never let go of the vision of who he wanted to be.
His path was momentarily derailed when he enrolled in the air force because of his fantasy (caught by watching war movies) of being a fighter pilot, but once they made him an engineer he began to plot his way out. “I was there for three years, eight months and 10 days,” he laughs. “I realised I had no tolerance for three things: being told what to do, institutionalised racism and stupidity. And I found all three in the army.” Then, while every other black actor in New York headed for Los Angeles to become part of the 1970s blaxploitation films, Freeman stayed in theatre in New York and waited for Hollywood to call. He didn’t want to hang around queuing for roles he didn’t really want. “It sounds kind of back-slapping to say it, but there are people who do march to their own drum, and I’ve found that if you do that, you’ll usually succeed at something.”
He believes in destiny combined with hard work.
“I knew fairly early on where I wanted to go,” he says, “but destiny doesn’t just happen to you. You have to pursue it vigorously. It’s what you do with what you have that matters, and that can involve some sacrifices and delayed gratification and, in my case, that gratification was delayed for quite a while.” This, he says, could be the reason why he escaped the crash-and-burn trajectory of some stars who made good in Hollywood. “If that’s true,” he says, modestly, “it is pure serendipity. It has probably to do with timing. My success, as it were, was a long time coming. I was a bit on in years. You know, I’d been around the block once or twice.”
Unlike the new generation of Hollywood stars, Freeman isn’t lending his name to alleviating poverty in the developing world or to stopping genocide in Darfur. His philanthropy is closer to home. He has resurrected the tiny, defunct community in Clarksdale, home of the blues, with Madidi, a five-star restaurant, and a blues club called Ground Zero. And, in the wake of Ivan, the hurricane that devastated his beloved Grenada in 2004, he created the Grenada Relief Fund (www.grfund.org), which has been instrumental in helping the islanders back on their feet – so successfully that the charity has changed its focus to preparing for future hurricanes, a focus that has become crucial since the havoc created by Katrina in 2005.
His activism, if you can call it that, remains mainly on screen in roles he hopes will inspire as well as entertain, and in his example of a life that began in abject poverty and reached the highest possible achievement without him being trapped by his success. Maybe it’s the sailing and the flying and the horse-riding that’s kept him clear of the usual hubris of such a trajectory, but he displays a rare perception of his role in the overall scheme of things. After spending some hours with him, I’m still curious as to how he’s managed it. So I bring up the question of faith. “Oh, this whole thing about faith,” he lightens the question with a laugh. “I’ve had this discussion a few times. I do have faith, but it’s changed for me over the years. It’s not very Catholic, in the sense that you can go off and do things, commit crimes against humanity or against yourself, and then be absolved by the confessional. That’s way too convenient.
I don’t think we are directed so much from without as from within. It’s what you do with what you have, and we must bear the responsibility for it all – good, bad or indifferent.”
I ask if there was a moment of epiphany for his beliefs, and he pauses. “Well,” he says, “I had three brothers, and I was really close to my eldest brother. He was in the Marines and drowned during the Korean war when I was about 13. When he died I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that there was a God who would permit that. He was the best of us. There’s a saying that the good die young, but it made no sense to me. I had to rethink my old approach to anything metaphysical. After a time, I came to the conclusion that it might have been a good thing, since he was a good person and becoming a killer wasn’t part of his nature.”
Suddenly he’s looking at his watch. He’s got a game of golf to catch. We gather ourselves up, find our way through a warren of corridors to the entrance of the golf club. We step outside into the soupy Mississippi air. “Aaah!” He takes a deep breath of appreciation. “I hate air conditioning.” Of course, Hollywood could never really get under his skin.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2439802.ece
by Nicola Graydon
The air in Memphis is so humid you could drink it. It’s trying to rain but that doesn’t deter Morgan Freeman from practising his golf swing. I’m under a canopy watching Will, the coach, give him a master class at Southwind golf club. It’s all about the hands and the hips (he’s stiff around the hips, apparently). He claims to be protecting a torn muscle in his back, but Will isn’t giving him a break. “I know you like a challenge,” he says. Freeman is all elegance in grey slacks, a pistachio-green shirt and a snappy white panama hat. “My work isn’t work,” he says, with a grin. “In that sense I’m to the manor born. It’s easy. Now this,” he brandishes his club, “this is work.” He’s only been playing golf for nine months but, according to his coach, he’s better than some who’ve been playing for years.
It’s difficult to imagine that this is a man who turned 70 in June. While I’m immobile and wilting in the heat, he hits one ball after the other while his coach prods his hips and adjusts his shoulders. Two hours later he’s as fresh as a daisy, and as we adjourn to the bar he orders a double vodka on the rocks with two fat olives.
So what’s his elixir? “Well,” he says in an accent more Southern than expected, but with the familiar timbre that rolls into the brain receptors like good brandy, “for a start, I got good genes from my mother. She was 89 when she died but she could have lived much longer than that. She told me she just got tired of it all and wanted to go.
“And I’ve never been very good with rules, so I do things a little differently. Now some people start to behave in certain ways just because they think they should because they’ve reached a certain age. You know, they get out the rocking chair, slow down. Now why would I want to slow down when I feel like I’m just getting started?”
Freeman is a self-confessed late developer. He was nearly 50 before he really cracked it on the screen in 1987, with a fierce portrayal of a pimp in Street Smart, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. He says he’d wanted to act since he was 13, and apart from a stint in the air force when he decided to be a fighter pilot, he never wanted to do anything else. Were there moments when he lost faith? “Oh God, yes,” he says, groaning at the memory. “For instance, I’d started getting a name for myself. I’d done a couple of Broadway musicals, I’d been a part of The Electric Company, so my name started to have some recognition. Then, in December 1981, I finished a play on Broadway and the phone just stopped ringing. I started to think I should look for other options to pay the rent, but the landlord was wonderful. I’d phone and say, ‘Nothing’s coming in,’ and he would say, ‘As long as you keep in contact, I know you’re good for it.’ ” The drought lasted for two years, only to be broken by Othello in Texas. “And I was awful,” he admits. “One of the worst things I’ve ever done – but it was work.”
His career lull continued for five more years. He thinks it might have been because he’d got himself a reputation. He relates three anecdotes, not in any particular order. “I was up for a role in a TV series of The Odd Couple. I know,” he raises his eyebrows at me, “why go there? In the audition I asked them if they had new scripts. They said, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘Let me get this straight, you are doing The Odd Couple but with blackface.’ They looked at me, looked at each other and said, ‘Well, yes.’ I told them I wasn’t interested.”
Then he auditioned for The Thing, a sci-fi set in the Antarctic. “There were eight scientists and three supporting roles – a cook, a driver and a radio operator. They were all black and the scientists were all white. I pointed that out and said I wasn’t interested.” At another audition he recalls that the director asked him to “do it blacker”. “Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous as that? What is blacker? Has anyone been asked to ‘do it whiter’? I don’t know for sure, but I think they started to think I was trouble.”
Then, in 1987, he landed the role of Fast Black in Street Smart. To watch it again is to be re-introduced to a very different Morgan Freeman and to realise what a brilliant chameleon he is. Fast Black is as far from his patrician image as it’s possible to get. And he remains the actor’s favourite character. He recalls the audition for the role that brought on the thaw: “I was sitting outside the audition and I could hear all the other actors screaming and yelling. Now, I was living high up on the Upper West Side in New York, so I knew pimps, and I knew that pimps never yell. They talk very, very quietly. So I went in there and…” then he leaps to his feet and steps towards me. “And I grabbed her hair like this…” he grabs my hair and pulls my head backwards and puts his two fingers under my eyes and says, “which eye, the left or the right,” in the most un-Freeman-like tones.
It’s terrifying and intoxicating at the same time. Mostly, Freeman is still as a salamander in the sun. Only his eyes are moving. He’s watching, listening, aware of the slightest movements around him shaping every nuance. Then, when he’s ready, he pounces to devastating effect.
He goes back to his seat, grinning. “So I got it. And I absolutely loved every minute of it. But I told them, ‘I’m not wearing any scrappy old hat or cheap shoes,’ so the costume designer took me to Saks and spent most of the budget kitting me out in Armani.” I tell him I loved the gold tooth. “That was all me.” Then the roles started pouring in. It’s like an honour roll of iconic American cinema: Lean on Me, Driving Miss Daisy, Glory, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Unforgiven, The Shawshank Redemption, Amistad, Se7en, Million Dollar Baby. “You know how it is. It’s like money. If you have it, it’s easy to get it.”
There’s little in Freeman’s background that suggests the seeds of greatness. His father was an alcoholic who died in 1961 at 47 from cirrhosis of the liver, and he saw his mother struggle to make ends meet with a variety of men who, as he puts it, were “simple respites from grinding poverty”.
“My mother was a rolling stone,” he says affectionately. “There were five of us – from four different fathers.
She didn’t necessarily make good choices there.” He had
no relationship with his father. “I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me very much either.”
Is this a reason why he gravitates towards these benign fatherly roles – even pushing it to the heavenly father himself in Bruce Almighty and now Evan Almighty? “Maybe, but it hasn’t necessarily made me a good father. You know, Henry Fonda became that role in American cinema, the patrician father figure, but he wasn’t a good parent. I mean, my kids love me, but it could just be because I’m rich.” He laughs, but he’s only half-joking.
As a child he was shunted from grandparent to grandparent, city to city. His maternal grandmother died from pneumonia when he was six, so he was sent back to his mother in Chicago where she was working as a cleaner. “That was my first slap in the face,” he recalls. “I got off the train in December, and that wind was the unfriendliest thing I’d ever encountered.” He only lived in the Windy City for a few years before returning to the warm South.
In America in the 1950s his dreams of being an actor must have seemed like crazy talk. Did his mother ever try to dissuade him? He slowly shakes his head and, bringing his wrists together, his palms outwards, he mimes her gently shepherding her middle son out into the sun. “She promised to send me to Hollywood, but in the end I took her. To the Golden Globes on the red carpet.” So you were her star child? He nods. “Guess you could say I was, yes.”
And his enormous pride at this fact is, you sense, not because of his success but because of what he brought to her after years of thankless struggle that culminated in a final pregnancy when he was 12 years old, with another man who was gone before she could begin to contemplate how she was going to do it all over again. “It was traumatic, very stressful.” And now his elbows are on his knees and I’m looking at the crown of his panama hat with a golf tee tucked jauntily into the band. He’s talking so quietly, my tape recorder barely registers over the air conditioning. He starts to tell her story. “Her parents, my grandparents, were doing well. He was a tailor, and he had a store in downtown Memphis. They were light-skinned, almost middle-class, going places. She was their only child. And then they had a fire. My grandfather tried to rescue his clients’ clothes and all his bolts of cloth, so he kept going back in. He went completely blind soon afterwards. So then my grandmother had to go out to work. My mother stayed home with her blind father. She was just six years old.”
“So that explains the rolling stone,” I say after a long pause. He looks up finally. “Yep, that about explains it.”
Both of us are a bit stumped by this unexpected emotion. It’s as if he’s reliving the pain he felt as a boy watching his mother struggle. But you sense that her absolute confidence in him is a decisive element of his character. For despite, or maybe because, of this precarious childhood, Freeman gives off an air of invincibility; a man absolutely in control of his destiny and untroubled by self-doubt. As he says, he was born to do this. And by this, he means all of this: the acting, the iconic roles, the fame, the money, the yacht, the plane, this life. He’s the embodiment of Tom Robbins’s maxim: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
When not on location, Freeman disappears to his 120-acre ranch near Charleston, Mississippi, where he lives with his wife, the costume designer Myrna Colley-Lee, and thoroughbred horses that he rides every day. Golf has taken over somewhat, but one of his great pleasures remains sailing the Caribbean in his boat, a fine-boned Shannon 43, although work has kept him on land for a couple of years.
“I learnt to sail in 1967, so it was with me long before I was successful,” he says, when I ask if sailing is an antidote to Hollywood. “Sailing in the deep ocean is a life challenge. You go out there and you meet yourself. It can’t be avoided. So you get a pretty good idea of your courage and your humanity. Who are you? What are your capabilities? What is the limit of your commitment? You learn these things.”
It was his love of the ocean that brought him to Grenada, the southernmost of the Caribbean’s Windward Islands and one of the least developed, where he now has a house,
and which became a place of respite during the late 1990s. “I loved it because it was a much simpler place than some of the other islands. Of course, they want the place to be discovered by tourism and I’d much rather it stayed as it is.”
Five years ago – at an age when the rest of us are getting our free bus pass – he learnt to fly, and now he flies his Cessna to film sets all over the US. He’s waiting for a plane that can fly across the Atlantic. “Two things I don’t do,” he grins. “I don’t do cold and I don’t fly commercial.”
With all this he should be smug or arrogant or aloof or something unpleasant, but he’s none of those things. Everyone who works with him says a film set is a happier, calmer place when he’s around. Nobody can imagine anyone else working in Hollywood today who could possibly carry off playing God. Earlier, over a breakfast of southern grits, he asks me what I want to talk about. I say I’m here to find out how he’s managed to rise above the Hollywood fray and foster such an impeccable reputation after so long in show business. He chuckles wickedly:
“You know, I was hanging out with Sidney Poitier and we were trying to decide if he or I were the better actor.
We decided it was me as I convinced the world I could sing.” His 1968 Broadway debut was in Hello, Dolly!
Then he spends at least some of the interview disabusing me of any notions of his imminent canonisation. So, what’s your vice, he asks when we chat briefly about Se7en. “Oh, vanity, I suppose, with a smidgen of sloth,” I confess. “What’s yours?” He looks at me with a wolfish grin and a playfulness pulling at the corner of his eyes. “Lust.”
I wonder if his own saintly reputation has become something of a yoke; if he’s looking for something to express a darker side. He confesses it’s difficult to break out of the Freeman mould. “I loved playing Fast Black. He was so bad he was good. The greatest joy of acting is that you can be any number of people, so I’m looking for something off the beaten track, something outside the regular thing that people expect me to be doing. But it’s not easy to find.”
For now, he’s most looking forward to tarnishing the halo of another saintly icon, Nelson Mandela, in a film he’s producing as well as starring in. Rumours about Freeman playing the former South African president have been swirling around Hollywood for years. The pair have become firm friends since Freeman bought the rights to Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. “We made an agreement that whenever we were in the same continent we would try and get together, so I’ve spent some good times with him, which is an incredible privilege.”
“We’ve been waiting for a decent script,” he says about the imminent film, “but nobody could adapt the autobiography; it was probably too ambitious in scope, in any case. Now this,” he smiles broadly, “this script is brilliant, very powerful.” It’s based on The Human Factor: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Changed the World, by veteran journalist John Carlin. It focuses on Mandela’s first year in office, pivoting on his appearance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, when he wore a Springbok rugby jersey – a symbol of white power – reassuring the whites in the race-riven country that he was a genuine peacemaker.
“It focuses on Mandela the human being,” says Freeman, “not Madiba the hero. Mandela may be beloved around the world, but as far as he’s concerned he failed his mother, his wives and his children. We’re going to be looking at what is going on beneath the surface, the man behind the image.”
Meanwhile, the man behind Freeman’s image is edgier, angrier and sexier in the flesh. He’s also taller and lankier than expected, with legs that go on for ever. When I ask about the difference between acting on stage and in film he says: “Grounding. On stage it is rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. You peel back the character like an onion, revealing deeper aspects. Take Coriolanus, for example. I realised some way into rehearsal that the mother adored her warrior-general son; that when he walked through the door with all his wounds and scars she’d get wet she was so excited by it. The wife was totally peripheral. It was all about his mother. I realised that it had this whole incest element going on.”
He’s leaning forward and, like with his impression of Fast Black, he’s lost all his laconic Southern charm; his body is taut, burning with an inner fire that combusts when this talk of empires and war inevitably leads to talk about Iraq. “It’s a tragedy for this country,” he says furiously. “I knew there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction by reading Newsweek, so how come the politicians didn’t know? Nothing so much as moved without us knowing about it.
I can’t believe that we were dragged into this thing because of the motivations of just two or three individuals. Bush and Cheney, of course. What I can’t understand is Tony Blair and Colin Powell. These are intelligent men. What were they doing? Powell must have known he was holding up a vial full of nothing at the UN. And Tony Blair? What was he thinking?” He’s genuinely baffled and very angry.
“You know those mothers of the marines, they’re so proud of their sons, in uniform, fighting for their country, until they come back in a box, or crazy or maimed for life –because you can be sure it will be one of those three things.”
“We are looking at a case of colossal national stupidity right now. How did we wind up with a president who claims not to read? How did that happen? We’re in a very unfortunate situation that should be a grist for national anger, but we don’t seem to be doing anything about it.”
I ask if he has ever thought about going into politics. He looks at me in horror. “I’ve never been attracted to politics because it’s about lying,” he says, vehemently. “Acting is the opposite: you pretend to be someone else, but you are doing it to reveal the truth about something or someone.”
Despite his desire to find a role like Fast Black to give his acting a darker range, Freeman is still investing in films that benefit humanity. His production company, Revelations Entertainment, which he founded in 1997, has as its motto “to enlighten, express heart and glorify the human experience”, and his most memorable roles achieve one or all of those things: Principal Joe Clark in Lean on Me; Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy; Sergeant Major Joe Rawlins in Glory; Judge Leonard White in The Bonfire of the Vanities; Ned Logan in Unforgiven; and Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in The Shawshank Redemption. Nonetheless, he claims never to have made a conscious decision to seek out movies with a moral centre. “I gravitated towards them instinctively,” he says. “I was brought up on movies where the hero was the hero. There was no ambiguity about it. Crime never paid.”
He hopes Revelation might achieve a legacy of films with those values. “Somewhere in my youth I learnt an awful lot from the movies – they are the best teachers because they get your attention. So you see a movie about the Lewis and Clark expeditions, or Ben Hur or El Cid, and without realising it you are learning something about history. There’s a lot of history, of American history, that has not been told, and I think if you have the option to do it, then you have an obligation to do it.”
For this reason he cites Glory, the heroic story of the first all-black volunteer regiment in the civil war, as one of his most important movie experiences. “Here was a historical moment that might have been lost had it not been for Ed Zwick resurrecting it for the screen.” I mention Amistad as the only mainstream historical film about slavery, and he corrects me: “Amistad was not about slavery,” he says, “it was about the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. Slavery as a trade had already been outlawed, so these people had been kidnapped. We need to clear up some stuff about slavery. We look on the US as the culprit, but all they were doing was taking advantage of cheap labour. Slavery existed in Africa for hundreds of years. We did not go in there and capture people; they were kidnapped by African and Arab slavers. It would be a good thing to finally take that stigma off ourselves.”
To my naive English ear, this sounds like sacrilege coming from an African-American, but I’m beginning to realise that Freeman is more iconoclast than icon and he resolutely refuses to let racism be an issue, despite his early experiences that might have tainted his view. America, he says, is not as racist as it thinks it is. He tells a story of a long discussion he had with a Cambodian film-maker. “She said to me, ‘You know what you have in America? You have a mild case of racial intolerance. We had racial hatred in Cambodia. It was there in Rwanda, and you have it in Darfur.’ That put things into perspective for me.”
Certainly, Freeman’s formidable success would justify this conviction, but still I wonder if it’s more to do with his singular sense of who he is. His first performance on stage was when he was eight years old, and he admits that several teachers recognised, and encouraged, his talent and he really never let go of the vision of who he wanted to be.
His path was momentarily derailed when he enrolled in the air force because of his fantasy (caught by watching war movies) of being a fighter pilot, but once they made him an engineer he began to plot his way out. “I was there for three years, eight months and 10 days,” he laughs. “I realised I had no tolerance for three things: being told what to do, institutionalised racism and stupidity. And I found all three in the army.” Then, while every other black actor in New York headed for Los Angeles to become part of the 1970s blaxploitation films, Freeman stayed in theatre in New York and waited for Hollywood to call. He didn’t want to hang around queuing for roles he didn’t really want. “It sounds kind of back-slapping to say it, but there are people who do march to their own drum, and I’ve found that if you do that, you’ll usually succeed at something.”
He believes in destiny combined with hard work.
“I knew fairly early on where I wanted to go,” he says, “but destiny doesn’t just happen to you. You have to pursue it vigorously. It’s what you do with what you have that matters, and that can involve some sacrifices and delayed gratification and, in my case, that gratification was delayed for quite a while.” This, he says, could be the reason why he escaped the crash-and-burn trajectory of some stars who made good in Hollywood. “If that’s true,” he says, modestly, “it is pure serendipity. It has probably to do with timing. My success, as it were, was a long time coming. I was a bit on in years. You know, I’d been around the block once or twice.”
Unlike the new generation of Hollywood stars, Freeman isn’t lending his name to alleviating poverty in the developing world or to stopping genocide in Darfur. His philanthropy is closer to home. He has resurrected the tiny, defunct community in Clarksdale, home of the blues, with Madidi, a five-star restaurant, and a blues club called Ground Zero. And, in the wake of Ivan, the hurricane that devastated his beloved Grenada in 2004, he created the Grenada Relief Fund (www.grfund.org), which has been instrumental in helping the islanders back on their feet – so successfully that the charity has changed its focus to preparing for future hurricanes, a focus that has become crucial since the havoc created by Katrina in 2005.
His activism, if you can call it that, remains mainly on screen in roles he hopes will inspire as well as entertain, and in his example of a life that began in abject poverty and reached the highest possible achievement without him being trapped by his success. Maybe it’s the sailing and the flying and the horse-riding that’s kept him clear of the usual hubris of such a trajectory, but he displays a rare perception of his role in the overall scheme of things. After spending some hours with him, I’m still curious as to how he’s managed it. So I bring up the question of faith. “Oh, this whole thing about faith,” he lightens the question with a laugh. “I’ve had this discussion a few times. I do have faith, but it’s changed for me over the years. It’s not very Catholic, in the sense that you can go off and do things, commit crimes against humanity or against yourself, and then be absolved by the confessional. That’s way too convenient.
I don’t think we are directed so much from without as from within. It’s what you do with what you have, and we must bear the responsibility for it all – good, bad or indifferent.”
I ask if there was a moment of epiphany for his beliefs, and he pauses. “Well,” he says, “I had three brothers, and I was really close to my eldest brother. He was in the Marines and drowned during the Korean war when I was about 13. When he died I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that there was a God who would permit that. He was the best of us. There’s a saying that the good die young, but it made no sense to me. I had to rethink my old approach to anything metaphysical. After a time, I came to the conclusion that it might have been a good thing, since he was a good person and becoming a killer wasn’t part of his nature.”
Suddenly he’s looking at his watch. He’s got a game of golf to catch. We gather ourselves up, find our way through a warren of corridors to the entrance of the golf club. We step outside into the soupy Mississippi air. “Aaah!” He takes a deep breath of appreciation. “I hate air conditioning.” Of course, Hollywood could never really get under his skin.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2439802.ece
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Comment #1 (Posted by Charles A. Gilmore, Jr.)
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An excellent interview with a great actor who comes across as a great human being as well. I can't think of anyone I'd rather see playing the role of Nelson Mandela - not Danny Glover, nor Sidney Poitier, not even Denzel Washington. (And if they ever write a movie about Kofi Annan, Morgan Freeman would be a natural for the part.)
