Word: freeman
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...