Hollywood icon Morgan Freeman picks a selection of his favourite roles
With over 150 film and television credits to his name, Morgan Freeman still shows no signs of slowing down even into his late 80s. But having been so prolific for so long, it takes a special kind of role to stick in his memory as a personal favourite.
If 100 people were asked to name a handful of their most cherished performances by the Academy Award-winning star, then at least 99 of them would name Ellis ‘Red’ Redding from The Shawshank Redemption, which endures as an iconic turn in a beloved movie destined to stand the test of time and win over new viewers for generations to come.
However, Freeman’s relationship with Frank Darabont’s seminal Stephen King adaptation is a complicated one, dating all the way back to the disagreements between director and star during production. He’s well beyond sick of talking about at this point, and when pressed to name the characters, parts, and films that stand out in his distinguished career as the cream of the crop, The Shawshank Redemption was nowhere to be found.
The veteran landed an Oscar nomination for his contributions, and many of his most memorable soundbites are still widely quoted to this day, but clearly, he doesn’t hold the prison drama on the same pedestal as almost everybody else. Still, when someone has amassed a body of work like he has, it’s not as if there aren’t a wide array of diverse and powerful turns to choose from.
Modestly responding with “all of them” when quizzed on his favourite roles when speaking to the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Freeman then got more specific. The first he named stands out for a very special reason after it served as the big screen breakthrough he’d been waiting on for decades.
“This movie I did where I played a pimp, I really, really enjoyed it,” he said, but that doesn’t quite cover the importance of 1987’s Street Smart. Beyond being the first Oscar-nominated performance of his career, bringing the vicious street-level thug Leo Smalls to life opened the doors for Freeman to gain a foothold in cinema that he’d been trying to secure for 20 years at that point.
Another character that saw him shortlisted for an Oscar also made the cut, and while Driving Miss Daisy isn’t held up as one of the greatest ‘Best Picture’ winners of all time, Freeman was eminently familiar with what was required, having previously played it on stage. “I really, really enjoyed playing Hoke Colburn in Driving Miss Daisy,” he explained. “I did it both on the stage and on-screen; it was somebody I knew really well.”
The three films Freeman worked on with friend and regular collaborator Clint Eastwood ended up winning a combined total of eight Oscars from 18 nominations, so it makes complete sense that he’d fondly recall each of the trio, despite playing such vastly different characters in all of them.
“I always wanted to do a western,” he said of Unforgiven. “And here comes Clint Eastwood saying, ‘Hey, let’s ride along on this one.'” One of the genre’s greatest-ever movies, the leading man and director’s hard-edged revisionist story, gave Freeman a meaty supporting part to sink his teeth into with Ned Logan, and the same can also be said of boxing drama Million Dollar Baby, another title the actor “really enjoyed”.
Inhabiting one of modern history’s most notable and famous figures is a tall order as it is, never mind when the person in question was still alive at the time and had named Freeman as the ideal candidate to play them on-screen, but Nelson Mandela’s instincts proved spot on when the actor was rewarded with another Oscar nomination for Eastwood’s Invictus. The two had met on several occasions and forged a kinship, with Freeman outlining how he “really, really enjoyed playing Madiba.”
Curiously, then, with the sole exception of The Shawshank Redemption, every single one of the roles Freeman named as his favourites saw him placed firmly in the running for Oscars glory, and all but one of them – and his solitary win to date – came in features helmed by Eastwood.
