Morgan Freeman is an American actor, producer, and narrator. Throughout a career spanning five decades and multiple film genres, he has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as a nomination for a Tony Award. He has also been awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2008, an AFI Life Achievement Award in 2011, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012, and Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2018. Freeman is widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time.
Freeman was born on June 1, 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the son of Mamie Edna (née Revere; 1912–2000), a teacher, and Morgan Porterfield Freeman (July 6, 1915 – April 27, 1961), 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.
