Morgan Freeman is an American actor, who has one of Hollywood's most distinctive voices of all, and has starred in over 100 films. He is probably best known for playing the Easy Reader in the PBS educational children's show The Electric Company. He is also well-known for his role as God in the 2003 fantasy comedy film Bruce Almighty and its 2007 sequel Evan Almighty. Additionally, he is known for portraying Patrick Meighan in the 2015 satirical comedy film Ted 2.
For Disney, he played Drosselmeyer in the 2018 fantasy adventure film The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. He was also the narrator for the Hall of Presidents. Additionally, he was mentioned in the Girl Meets World episode "Girl Meets Jexica" and the MECH-X4 episode "Let's Get Some Answers!"
Freeman was born on June 1, 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the son of Mamie Edna (née Revere), a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman, a barber, who died of cirrhosis in 1961. He has three older siblings. Some of Morgan's great-great-grandparents were enslaved people who migrated from North Carolina to Mississippi. He later discovered that his white maternal great-great-grandfather had lived with and was buried beside Freeman's black great-great-grandmother in the segregated South, as the two could not legally marry at the time. The DNA test suggested that among all of his African ancestors, a little over one-quarter came from the area that stretches from present-day Senegal to Liberia and three-quarters came from the Congo-Angola region.
As an infant, Freeman was sent to his paternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi. He moved frequently during his childhood, living in Greenwood, Mississippi; Gary, Indiana; and finally Chicago. He made his acting debut at age nine, playing the lead role in a school play. He then attended Broad Street High School, a building which serves today as Threadgill Elementary School in Greenwood. At age 12, he won a statewide drama competition, and while settling into school, discovered music and theater. When Freeman was 16 years old, he contracted pneumonia.
Freeman graduated high school in 1955, but turned down a partial drama scholarship from Jackson State University, opting instead to enlist in the United States Air Force. He served as an Automatic Tracking Radar repairman, rising to the rank of airman first class. After serving from 1955 to 1959, he moved to Los Angeles and took acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse. He also studied theater arts at Los Angeles City College, where a teacher encouraged him to embark on a dance career.
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- Freeman was originally considered for the role of Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, along with several other actors, before Liam Neeson was ultimately selected.[1]
