Why Morgan Freeman doesn't fear death at all
Morgan Freeman may be in his seventies, but he's got plenty of ambitions left to fulfil. Lesley O'Toole hears about them
Friday, 8 February 2008
"I don't think I'd want to live for ever," announces Morgan Freeman, lifting his sunglasses and squinting at the glare of the hotel room lights. "I think there are going to be some downturns in the human existence that I don't want to be here for. But I would like to live a really, really, really long time. I don't fear death at all. What I fear is how I die. I don't want to be embarrassed. That's it."
There seems little prospect of such a fate befalling this statuesque man (who turns 71 in June), but either way, he has already made his intentions known. "I don't want to be burnt up. I don't want to be entombed in a crypt somewhere. I want life everlasting. That means going into the ground, going back to Mother Earth, and she will spit you back out again."
Such subject matter is the province of his new film The Bucket List, so named for one's to-do list before "kicking the bucket". "I think we all have a private bucket list. It may not be written down, but I'm constantly checking them off. I just checked off Jack Nicholson [his co-star]. Every day was a holiday because I've been praying at the temple of Jack ever since Five Easy Pieces. I had a chance to ride with him on the Warner Brothers plane with Clint [Eastwood]. I got to jawing what a fan I was, and as actors will do, he expressed how he liked my work. Then we started talking about how we could make a sequel to [the 1973 Nicholson film] The Last Detail. But that didn't pan out."
Freeman insists he is not especially close to his Bucket List character. "I've never been a mechanic. Throughout my life, what I have been is an actor, a pretender. I do have the wife and the family and the stuff like that but on the other hand, I'm – knock on wood – outstandingly healthy."
Freeman has retained a healthy sense of what's important in life. We have met many times over the last 15 years and little about him seems to change. His face is as staggeringly unlined as it was 10 years ago. It's either genetics, Crème de la Mer or simply striking the right balance between work and life. "I work about half the year. I'm just a guy who enjoys his work and enjoys working with people who enjoy their work. When that happens you get a bonding situation and if it come out with a good product, then that ties you even closer together. It's almost like a great love affair."
Freeman's mother was a cleaner in Memphis, his father a barber who later died from cirrhosis of the liver. Moving from Charleston, Mississippi, to Indiana and then Chicago, he played the lead role in his school play aged eight and won a drama competition at 12. "I can remember teachers telling me, 'You're magic, you're good. You found your calling,'" he recalls. Instead, he pursued a dream of flying and tried to join the US Air Force even before he had left school. Eventually he signed up at 18, as a mechanic. He never did graduate to flying and left after five years. "My fantasy had to do with movies, not with killing people."
Freeman met Myrna, his second wife of 23 years, when both were struggling actors in New York. In 1967 he scored his first off-Broadway acting job, which meant his leaving a clerk-typist day job in LA. "I made $70 a week as an actor and I'd been making $60 in LA. Making more than that as an actor was just unbelievable to me." He never went back to typing but had "some real lean times in-between. But I didn't have to go to work for anybody else. I didn't have to wash dishes, I didn't have to wait tables, I didn't have to drive a cab or wash cars." Freeman deliberately left himself nothing to fall back on. "If you've got a cushion, where you land, you stay. You can't climb a mountain with a net. If you've got the net, you'll let go."
It was arduous climbing. His first credited film role came in 1971 and he starred on the daytime soap Another World and also appeared in children's TV. It wasn't until the mid-Eighties that Freeman began to shine in parts as diverse as the gentle chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy and a pimp in Street Smart (both of which earned him Academy Award nominations), plus an inspirational sergeant in Glory.
In 1995, he earned a second Best Actor nod for The Shawshank Redemption. Some years ago, he told me: "The studios believe that audiences won't buy me as a bad guy. They're terrified no one will come if I play a bad guy even though my first Academy Award nomination was playing a bad dude."
He won, for another good guy, with 2005's Million Dollar Baby. Still, Freeman has graduated to less wholesome roles. In Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck's directorial debut), he is if not fully bad, then of questionable moral compass. In 2006's The Contract – which tellingly, perhaps, went straight to DVD – he was an assassin. In this year's The Code he will be a career thief but he will also reprise his role as Lucius Fox in the sequel to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, The Dark Knight.
While Freeman is an oddity among stars, residing as he does in Mississippi, he does live comparatively lavishly there – in a mansion on a 120-acre estate. "I have horses, a boat, a farm. That's one of the places I live; the other is on my boat." In the nearby town of Clarkson, he owns a restaurant and a blues club, and is often spotted shaking a leg in the latter and paying for his own meals (his favourite is seabass with wilted turnip. But more often than not, if he's not working, Freeman and his wife are to be found cruising the Caribbean on their luxury yacht. "If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn't worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it's life or death."
His boat is often anchored in Trinidad or the Virgin Islands. Freeman saw first-hand the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Ivan on the island of Grenada in September 2004. The following year he launched the Grenada Relief Fund for rebuilding, including a book featuring celebrities' favourite Caribbean recipes. He has since extended the charity's catchment area to include the whole of the Caribbean and south and east US coastlines, including the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Flying now, finally, satisfies the same criterion as sailing. At 65, Freeman earned his pilot's licence. About the same time, he also took up an activity more commonly enjoyed by men his age: golf. "I love it periodically. When you manage to make contact with the ball and it goes somewhere near where you wanted it to go, it's just a fantastic feeling."
Freeman says there are few roles that he dreams of playing; rather, there are some stories to tell. His ambition is to produce a Best Picture nominee or winner for his company, Revelations Entertainment (motto: To enlighten, express heart and glorify the human experience). While many of its projects inevitably feature Freeman, one of its most unusual in development is Slide Away, a story featuring the ghost of doomed INXS singer Michael Hutchence telling his life story to his daughter Tiger Lily.
When that third Best Actor nomination arrives, it will more than likely be for Freeman's long-delayed role as Nelson Mandela in The Human Factor, due to start filming soon – again, under Eastwood's direction. But he's ready to give up on another dream, to make a Western. "The riding is fine, it's the getting up there that's problematic now," he laughs.
Freeman has gained much with age. Is wisdom one of his attributes? "I hope so. They say there's no fool like an old fool. But blessings be upon my wife because I think without her, I'd be somebody's fool by now."
'The Bucket List' opens on 15 February
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