The stroke of luck that launched Morgan Freeman’s acting career: “That was a big mistake”
Morgan Freeman came to fame in Hollywood at a fairly late age. By the time he landed Oscar nominations in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in the late 1980s, he was already pushing 50. However, he had been working as an actor from the ’60s, plying his trade in theatre and television before jumping to cinema. Freeman has freely admitted it was a stroke of luck that helped him land his first professional job in the late ’60s, though, and it involved a producer admitting he’d made a big mistake by not initially hiring him.
In the ’50s, Freeman left his native Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting full time. He enrolled in acting classes at the City College but, by his own admission, almost flunked out. In fact, the only thing that stopped him from being kicked out of school was his aptitude for dance movement classes, which were a part of the acting curriculum.
Reflecting on his career, the actor told Interview magazine that his teachers told him to concentrate on dancing because they felt it would help him land acting work. Unfortunately, he confessed, “I was 22 before I took my first dance class. I had never been athletic, so I was very stiff; I still am.” In 1964, Freeman danced at the World’s Fair as a member of Cabaret Union. Despite this, he knew there was no future for him in dancing.
Two years later, in 1966, Freeman got a job as an understudy on a tour of The Royal Hunt of the Sun and received his first taste of professional stage acting one night in Des Moines, Iowa. He revealed, “The feeling of rightness and power that washed over me on the stage that night came as a revelation to me. I said to myself, ‘This is what you do. This is where you really shine.'”
Freeman’s next step was moving to New York to pursue theatre. After auditioning for any production he could find, he made his Off-Broadway debut in 1967, making a princely $72 per week. Considering he’d been almost starving as a destitute aspiring actor until that point, it felt like an enormous amount of money. He admitted, “I was just trying to stay alive in New York. It was wonderful. I wasn’t hungry anymore, and neither was my dog.”
Around this time, Freeman auditioned for another Off-Broadway play but didn’t get the role. Instead, a friend of his was hired. However, when this pal was unceremoniously fired, Freeman received a fateful phone call from one of the producers. To his amazement, this producer admitted, “I’m one of the ones who didn’t want to hire you, and that was a big mistake, so I’m going to put you on Broadway.”
In one fell swoop, Freeman had gone from failing to get a job Off-Broadway to landing a more prestigious one in an all-black Broadway production of the musical Hello, Dolly! It was a stroke of luck the likes of which he’d been waiting a decade for, or perhaps it was simply a fair reward for the hard work he had put into his craft. Either way, he maintains, “That was my beginning.”
When asked by Interview if landing Hello, Dolly! was a big step for his career, Freeman humbly answered, “It was work. Every job was a big step.” From that point onward, though, acting began to look like a truly viable path for the young star, and it was all because one producer admitted he had made a mistake.
