Before the famous voice, Morgan Freeman repaired radar for the Air Force
Morgan Freeman turned down a drama scholarship in 1955 to fix tracking radar in the US Air Force. He then spent decades dancing, doing stage work and suffering through a children's TV show he disliked, before a 1987 role as a menacing street hustler finally made Hollywood take notice.
Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 1, 1937, the son of a teacher and a barber. As a baby he was sent to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi, and his childhood kept moving, through Greenwood, Gary in Indiana, and Chicago. He first acted at nine, as the lead in a school play, and at 12 won a statewide drama contest. Family research later uncovered a white great-great-grandfather who shared a home, and later a burial plot, with the actor's black great-great-grandmother, since the segregated South barred them from marrying.
After four years as an airman first class, ending in 1959, he moved to Los Angeles, trained at the Pasadena Playhouse and was urged by a college teacher to try dance. He danced at the 1964 World's Fair, made his Broadway debut in an all-black Hello, Dolly! in 1968, and in 1980 won an Obie for playing Coriolanus. From 1971 he appeared on PBS's The Electric Company, which paid the bills but made him miserable; he left in 1975.
The turn came with Street Smart, where his violent hustler drew praise from Roger Ebert and an Oscar nomination. Freeman himself called it his breakthrough. In 1989 alone he released four films, among them Glory, about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and Driving Miss Daisy, reprising the chauffeur Hoke Colburn he had already played on stage. The Oscar itself arrived for Million Dollar Baby, in which he played a former boxer for Clint Eastwood.
The voice became a career of its own, narrating documentaries such as March of the Penguins. He directed the drama Bopha! in 1993 and, with Lori McCreary, founded Revelations Entertainment in 1996, later producing Madam Secretary for CBS. Honours followed: a Kennedy Center Honor in 2008 and the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012.
Source: Morgan Freeman
