When Morgan Freeman won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby at the 2005 ceremony, he was 67 years old and collecting the trophy on his fourth nomination. The road there ran through theater, children’s television and decades of character work.
Freeman was born on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised largely in Mississippi by a grandmother in Charleston before moving between Greenwood, Gary, Indiana, and Chicago. At 12, he won a statewide drama competition. After graduating from high school in 1955, he turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University and enlisted in the Air Force, serving from 1955 to 1959 as an automatic tracking radar repairman and rising to airman first class. Acting classes in Los Angeles at the Pasadena Playhouse and Los Angeles City College came next.
The stage gave him his first footing. He danced at the 1964 World’s Fair, made his Off-Broadway debut in 1967 in a show about the Freedom Riders, and debuted on Broadway in 1968 in the all-Black production of Hello, Dolly! starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. In 1978, his role in The Mighty Gents brought a Tony nomination along with Drama Desk and Clarence Derwent awards, and his 1980 title role in Coriolanus at Shakespeare in the Park won an Obie Award.
Television had already made his face familiar: from 1971 to 1975, he was a cast member of The Electric Company, the PBS children’s series, a job he later described with mixed feelings. Film recognition arrived in middle age. Street Smart (1987), in which he played a violent pimp, brought his first Oscar nomination; Driving Miss Daisy (1989) brought a second, and The Shawshank Redemption (1994) a third. Between them came Glory, Lean on Me, Se7en, Amistad and Deep Impact.
The win finally came for Million Dollar Baby (2004), and a fifth nomination followed for Invictus (2009), in which he played Nelson Mandela. He also played Lucius Fox in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and appeared in the Now You See Me films through 2025.
His voice became a profession of its own. He narrated March of the Penguins, the science series Through the Wormhole and The Story of God with Morgan Freeman, among many documentaries. With business partner Lori McCreary, he founded Revelations Entertainment in 1996, which produced the CBS drama Madam Secretary.
Honors accumulated alongside the work: a 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.
Freeman has also invested in the Mississippi Delta. In Clarksdale, he opened Ground Zero Blues Club with attorney Bill Luckett and ran the restaurant Madidi for a ten-year run. Still active in his late eighties, he reprised his role as Secretary of State Edwin Mullis in Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness in 2026.
