Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman was fifty before Hollywood noticed him. Born in Memphis in 1937 and raised in Mississippi, he acted in school plays, studied theatre arts in Los Angeles and spent years on stage, winning an Obie for Coriolanus and appearing in Julius Caesar. A generation of American children knew him first from the 1970s educational series The Electric Company, which is a strange launchpad for the gravity he later traded on. The break was Street Smart in 1987, in which he plays a pimp with no charm whatsoever and which brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

What follows is one of the fastest late ascents anyone has managed: Glory, Lean on Me and Driving Miss Daisy all in 1989, the last bringing a Best Actor nomination, then Unforgiven opposite Clint Eastwood, then Se7en, then Red Redding in The Shawshank Redemption, a film that flopped and then quietly became the most watched thing he ever did. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby, and the honours arrived in a row after that: the Kennedy Center in 2008, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2011, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2018.

The voice became its own category, and it has cost him something. Directors worked out they could buy authority by the scene, so a good deal of his later filmography is the wise briefing officer in pictures with no other use for him. Worth remembering that the same instrument, properly used, gives you a detective in Se7en who is right about everything and takes no comfort from it at all.