Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman was born on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up moving between Mississippi, Indiana, and Illinois. His mother, Mamie Edna, was a teacher, and his father, Morgan Porterfield Freeman, was a barber who died in 1961. He has three older siblings. Some of his great-great-grandparents were enslaved people who moved from North Carolina to Mississippi, and he later learned that a white maternal great-great-grandfather lived with and was buried beside Freeman’s black great-great-grandmother in the segregated South, as they could not legally marry. DNA testing indicated that just over a quarter of his African ancestors came from the Senegal-to-Liberia region, and three-quarters came from the Congo-Angola area.

As an infant, Freeman was sent to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. He made his acting debut at age nine, playing the lead in a school play. At 12, he won a statewide drama competition, and he discovered music and theater in school. At 16, he contracted pneumonia. He graduated high school in 1955 but turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, where he served as an Automatic Tracking Radar repairman, reaching the rank of airman first class. After his service ended in 1959, he moved to Los Angeles, took acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse, and studied theater arts at Los Angeles City College, where a teacher encouraged him to pursue dance.

Freeman worked as a dancer at the 1964 World’s Fair and was part of the Opera Ring musical theater group in San Francisco. He acted in a touring production of *The Royal Hunt of the Sun* and appeared as an extra in Sidney Lumet’s 1965 film *The Pawnbroker*. He later said that after *The Royal Hunt of the Sun*, his acting career took off. He made his Off-Broadway debut in 1967 opposite Viveca Lindfors in *The Niggerlovers*, a play about the Freedom Riders, and debuted on Broadway in 1968 in an all-black version of *Hello, Dolly!* starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. In 1969, he performed on stage in *The Dozens*.

Beginning in 1971, Freeman starred in the PBS children’s show *The Electric Company*, which gave him financial stability and recognition, though he found the work tiring and quit in 1975. Producer Joan Ganz Cooney said he loathed the show, calling it a very unhappy period in his life; Freeman later acknowledged he doesn’t think about it but was grateful for the opportunity. His first credited film role was in 1971’s *Who Says I Can’t Ride a Rainbow!* That same year, he performed in a theater production of *Purlie*. After a break, he returned in 1978 with two stage productions: *The Mighty Gents*, for which he won a Drama Desk Award and a Clarence Derwent Award for playing a wino, and *White Pelicans*. He also appeared in Shakespearean plays *Coriolanus* and *Julius Caesar*, winning an Obie Award for the former, and earned a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his role as Zeke in *The Mighty Gents*.

Freeman’s film career includes an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a former boxer in Clint Eastwood’s *Million Dollar Baby* (2004). He received Oscar nominations for *Street Smart* (1987), *Driving Miss Daisy* (1989), *The Shawshank Redemption* (1994), and *Invictus* (2009). His other notable films include *Glory* (1989), *Lean on Me* (1989), *Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves* (1991), *Unforgiven* (1992), *Se7en* (1995), *Amistad* (1997), *Deep Impact* (1998), *Gone Baby Gone* (2007), and *The Bucket List* (2007). He played Lucius Fox in Christopher Nolan’s *Dark Knight* trilogy (2005–2012) and acted in *Wanted* (2008), *Red* (2010), *Oblivion* (2013), the *Now You See Me* films (2013–2025), and *Lucy* (2014).

Known for his distinctive voice, Freeman has narrated documentaries such as *The Long Way Home* (1997), *March of the Penguins* (2005), *Through the Wormhole* (2010–2017), *The Story of God with Morgan Freeman* (2016–2019), *Our Universe* (2022), and *Life on Our Planet* (2023). He made his directorial debut with the drama *Bopha!* (1993). In 1996, he co-founded the production company Revelations Entertainment with Lori McCreary, which produced projects including the CBS political drama *Madam Secretary* (2014–2019).

Over a career spanning six decades, Freeman has received an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and nominations for a Grammy and a Tony. He was honored with the Kennedy Center Honor in 2008, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2011, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2018. In a 2022 *Empire* readers’ poll, he was voted one of the 50 greatest actors of all time.