TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010890/0108460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 75

In the Driver's Seat


Actor Morgan Freeman eases into high gear

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    There were few black faces on the big screen back in the
1940s, when young Morgan Freeman collected soda bottles to pay
his way into the local movie matinee. And the one or two who
did appear made the young moviegoer squirm. He did not object
to their playing servants, jobs his own parents had
occasionally held, but it bothered him that these celluloid
domestics were presented as empty caricatures, devoid of human
dignity. "I didn't know anybody who acted like that," recalls
Freeman.

    Good roles for black actors are still hard to come by, but
audiences currently have a chance to see two unusually
full-bodied movie portrayals of the black experience: Driving
Miss Daisy, the critically acclaimed drama about the 25-year
relationship between an elderly Southern Jewish woman and her
black chauffeur, and Glory, a stirring account of the first
black regiment to serve in the Civil War. Morgan Freeman, now
52, stars in both.

    In less capable hands, John Rawlins, the illiterate
gravedigger who becomes a sergeant major in Glory, and Hoke
Colburn, the courtly chauffeur in Miss Daisy, could have become
sterile symbols of good intentions. But Freeman's performances
are so finely calibrated that these characters emerge as men
of true heft and substance. Says Glory director Edward Zwick:
"Morgan inhabits a role rather than performs it."

    Although he took acting classes when starting out, Freeman
follows no special school of acting. "I read Stanislavsky
recently," he says, referring to the high guru of acting
technique, "but that business of peeling away layers of skin
was too murky and deep for me. I haven't found that I've had
to do that in any intellectual sense. What I do, I do
intuitively. It just comes easy for me."

    Freeman first fell in love with acting in the third grade,
when he played the title role in a school play, Little Boy
Blue. Teachers along the way encouraged him to channel his
rambunctiousness into acting, and after a brief stint in the
Air Force he headed for Hollywood, naively believing he could
get an acting job just by showing up at a studio. But he wasn't
pretty like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte, the black
leading men of the day, and he soon realized that his chances
would be better in New York City's grittier theater scene.

    There Freeman found steady employment. He sometimes did what
he calls dungeon work, appearing in small workshop productions
in dusty church basements and drafty warehouse lofts, but he
also performed in an all-black cast of Hello Dolly! and with
a multiracial theater company at the New York Shakespeare
Festival. "He had very good speech, bore himself with a certain
grace and looked like a king," recalls producer Joseph Papp.

    On his agent's advice, Freeman passed up the
black-exploitation films of the early 1970s and instead took
the role of the hip character Easy Reader on the
public-television series The Electric Company. The job provided
a steady income and made Freeman so famous with the preteen set
that, to his great chagrin, he is still stopped in the street
by fans. After a while, he felt trapped, hungering for meatier
roles but needing the money to put bread on the table for his
wife and two daughters. He began drinking heavily. "I'm not an
alcoholic or anything," he says. "But I can get out of
control." One morning in 1975 he awoke to find himself lying
on the floor, passed out from the previous night's binge.
Freeman stopped drinking cold turkey. The series ended too, and
soon he was back to serious acting.

    His big break seemed to come in 1978, when Actors' Equity
named him best male newcomer of the season for his powerful
performance as a disillusioned wino in the short-lived Broadway
drama The Mighty Gents. Freeman was 40, and he thought he had
finally made it. Instead, a two-year drought followed. He was
considering chucking the business and driving a cab, when
offers began to dribble in. Then, along came the role of Fast
Black, the mercurial pimp, in the movie Street Smart.

    Taking the part seemed an odd choice for Freeman, who had
remained prickly about the kinds of roles offered to black
actors, but in Fast Black he saw a chance to flesh out the
stereotype. "I had no intention of wearing crushed-velvet jump
suits, big hats or high-heeled pumps," he says. But the changes
went far beyond the cosmetic, as Freeman transformed what could
have been another cliched pimp caricature into a harrowing
portrait of a desperately brutal man. The performance won three
major critics awards, an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting
Actor and Freeman his first crack at a starring role as the
bat-toting New Jersey high school principal Joe Clark in last
year's commercial success Lean on Me.

    Insiders are predicting that Freeman will win another Oscar
nomination for his portrayal of the chauffeur in Miss Daisy,
a role he originated in the off-Broadway production, and
producers have anointed him a bankable star. "People will be
making parts for Morgan," declares producer Richard Zanuck. But
Freeman has heard such talk before, and he is taking all the
praise in stride. Recently, he, his second wife, costume
designer Myrna Colley-Lee, and their seven-year-old
granddaughter E'Dena began to live part time on their 38-ft.
ketch Sojourner, which is moored in the Caribbean. "When you
live in the world of make-believe, you need something real,"
says Freeman. "I go sailing, I'm in the real world."