What did Morgan Freeman do before acting?
When he graduated from a Mississippi high school in 1955, Morgan Freeman had no idea that his future career would be in acting. He opted to serve in the US Air Force rather than continue his studies, and it was only at 22 years old that he realised his real passion.
After following his dream to Los Angeles, he began taking acting classes and got his first on-screen part as an uncredited extra in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film The Pawnbroker. Significant acting work was hard to come by, though, and Freeman struggled to make a stable living. That is until he landed the role of DJ Easy Reader in the educational children’s TV show The Electric Company in 1971.
He initially found the work rewarding, given the show’s success, as well as the regular pay packet and national exposure it gave him. But he soon got tired of his gimmicky role and felt he was prostituting himself for the sake of a steady income. When The Electric Company was cancelled in 1976, Freeman spent further stability jumping from part to part on stage and screen without any sustained success.
Until, at the age of 49, he was cast in Edward Zwick’s American Civil War epic Glory. “It took a while,” Freeman admitted during an American Film Institute retrospective in relation to his career trajectory. “It didn’t start until 1986.” But Freeman persisted, remaining optimistic despite decades of not quite making it. “Just keep tap-dancing; something good will happen,” he added. “Don’t sit down and say ‘I can’t’ because then you can’t.”
His persistence paid off, as his performance in Glory landed him larger roles in critically acclaimed big hitters such as Driving Miss Daisy and Unforgiven before the role that defined his career arrived in 1994. The Shawshank Redemption turned him into a Hollywood A-lister, with the freedom to pick and choose his roles.
But what about his time in the Air Force?
Freeman’s first job as an 18-year-old high-school graduate was repairing automatic tracking radars at US air bases. Over four years of service, he also learned to fly a plane and qualified for the rank of Airman 1st Class, as he came close to fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming a fighter pilot.
While training to be a pilot, however, he found that real warfare wasn’t for him. A powerful realisation dissuaded him from taking the training further. ”I was sitting in the nose of a bomb,” Freeman remembers feeling. Rather than the real thing, he discovered that it was actually the movie version of being a fighter pilot that had drawn him to the US Air Force in the first place. From that moment on, he committed to becoming an actor, realising the make-believe dreams of millions on screen.
Freeman still held a pilot’s licence and flew regularly until 2008, including an incident when he had to perform an emergency landing during a flight to Toronto for the city’s film festival. In 2012, his life came full circle when he played Batman’s associate, Lucius Fox, in the third instalment of the Dark Knight trilogy. Fox engineers and repairs an aircraft for Bruce Wayne.
53 years earlier, the young Freeman would scarcely have believed the extent to which his dream was going to come true so late in life. And that his work as an Air Force repairman was put to such good use on the big screen.
