How Paul Newman stopped Morgan Freeman from quitting acting: “I would talk myself out of it for one more day”
One of the most common jokes that’s been cracked about Morgan Freeman for more than 30 years is that there’s no chance he was ever a young man. Instead, he simply materialised as a middle-aged fountain of wisdom and gravitas, which admittedly isn’t too far wide of the mark. Professionally speaking, at least.
The actor made his stage and screen debut in the early 1960s, but he wouldn’t become a household name until he was 50 years old. For almost a quarter of a century, the most memorable role he’d ever played was in an educational children’s show where he took on a variety of guises until Street Smart came along and changed everything.
The Electric Company kept Freeman gainfully employed and busy between 1971 and 1977, but it would be another ten years before his first Academy Award nomination put him on the map. Everything changed from that point on, and he eventually settled into his groove as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand veterans, specialising in dispensing sage words of wisdom in his syrupy, smooth tones.
However, none of that would have happened if he’d followed through on his plans to ditch acting entirely, a crisis of confidence that occurred once his long-running episodic gig had drawn to a close. He wanted to branch out and test himself as a performer, but worthwhile offers were alarmingly thin on the ground.
“I wasn’t getting any work,” he admitted to Black Film. “My career sort of really cranked into gear in late 1967, so from 1967 to 1980, it was like a slow, gradual incline, with things moving along steadily.” Unfortunately, after the release of 1981’s thriller Eyewitness, it would be another three years before Freeman appeared in another feature.
By September 1983, things were looking grim. “I was thinking I should probably go get a hack licence because I was living in New York at the time,” he explained. “If I could get a hack licence, I could drive a limousine – I like driving – and try to get a limousine job. But every time I would get up in the morning to go, I would talk myself out of it for one more day.”
Freeman wanted to act, but nobody was willing to give him a shot. As far as guardian angels go, though, Paul Newman makes for a pretty good one. Tom Cruise may have unsuccessfully auditioned for the co-writer, director, producer, and leading man’s 1984 family drama Harry & Son, but Freeman fared much better.
“I went to audition for Paul Newman, and he gave me a job,” Freeman recalled of his three-year exile from the big screen finally drawing to a close. If he hadn’t gotten the part of Siemanowski, he might have ended up as a full-time taxi and limo driver.
To put the importance of Harry & Son into context, Freeman hadn’t been in a film for three years beforehand. In the four decades since, he’s never been absent from the big screen for more than one calendar year, and the last time he went 12 months without a theatrical credit was in 1999.
