Morgan Freeman believes that actors are the key figures in movies — the ones who make characters grab audiences by the lapels and invade their dreams.
He thinks movies become classics when a star like Gary Cooper in "High Noon" pumps his own lifeblood between the lines until a written role becomes a living symbol, like Cooper's strong, righteous, heartrendingly weary Marshal Will Kane.
"Gregory Peck and Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart — those guys" are his favorite performers, he once said. They're the ones he grew up with. They're the ones who clarified his perception of what a movie actor could be.
Last week, the American Film Institute put Freeman in the select company of Golden Age stars like James Cagney, Henry Fonda and James Stewart — and living legends like Kirk Douglas, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro. It honored him with the AFI Life Achievement Award.
"I'm in really tall cotton," he told The Baltimore Sun on the eve of his award. But he honored the AFI by accepting it.
The ceremony, which took place June 9, will air June 19 on TVLand. The AFI Silver is also hosting a retrospective that winds up with Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" — the boxing film that finally landed Freeman his Academy Award.
"Muhammad Ali — he's the master," Freeman said last week, reminiscing about fighters he'd admired before making "Million Dollar Baby." What links Freeman, with his spiky gravitas, and Ali, with his showboat verve, is wiliness. Like Ali in his rope-a-dope days, Freeman draws you in by holding back, then levels you with a glance.
When you watch Freeman play a character like William Somerset in "Se7en" — an homage to Cooper's Old West lawman, a contemporary homicide detective who can't turn off his moral and intellectual fervor with just a week left on the force — you know you're seeing a classic figure in the making.
Freeman is "an actor's actor" in more ways than one. All the best actors look up to him. And he, in turn, reveres them.
The AFI is honoring him more for movies like "Glory" than for "Red," but Freeman said he'd put "Red's" ensemble up against "Glory's" any day: "I'm a big fan of Bruce Willis' — I like the cool way he's always worked, all the way from 'Moonlighting.' We were in 'Bonfire of the Vanities' together and 'Lucky Number Slevin.' I just absolutely love Dame Helen Mirren. That woman can do anything; she has more guts than anybody I can think of except — maybe — Meryl Streep. And John Malkovich! We just had a wonderful time together."
As early as "Brubaker" (1980), where he gave a startling performance as a desperate death-row inmate, Freeman mastered the camera-ready craft of the Old Hollywood. He immediately knew how to bring something effortlessly personal to his roles, while also varying them with dash and aplomb.
You don't just think of his films as "Morgan Freeman movies," even when he's the star. You remember the names of Freeman's characters — not just Somerset in "Se7en" but, among others, Red in "The Shawshank Redemption" and Ned Logan in "Unforgiven" — just as you remember Cooper's Will Kane or Mr. Deeds or Bogart's Sam Spade or Mr. Rick.
The AFI is saluting him for a career full of dazzling, intuitive art, including five Oscar nominations for roles as different as Fast Black, the super-smart, volatile pimp in "Street Smart," and Hoke, the sly, gentle, profoundly patient driver in the Jim Crow South of "Driving Miss Daisy."
Almost 25 years ago, New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael asked her readers, "Is Morgan Freeman the greatest living American actor?" Kael threw down the greatest-living-actor challenge after she watched "Street Smart," a film few others saw. Hearing those words again, Freeman paused, chuckled and savored the surprising accolade all over again.
"Wasn't that a good question?", he asked, wryly. Immediately you got his innate wit and irony, and his immense capacity for playfulness.
Freeman said he didn't know what the AFI award would mean to him until he got an idea of the guest list. He brings a biblical resonance to his wonder at "the names, the names — the people who have accepted to come and talk about you."
Names like Sidney Poitier, Ashley Judd and Mike Nichols were on this year's AFI Life Achievement committee. "These people are particular to me," Freeman said. Then he acted out his amazement over the phone. "Oh, my goodness, no, really? Ah, heavens. I can't believe it. When you see who's coming to honor you, then it really becomes something."
Freeman's vocal and physical presences are so resonant and rich that he has been typecast as God. But he can make himself painfully vulnerable, as in Lasse Hallstrom's "An Unfinished Life," and even satanic, as in Timur Bekmambetov's "Wanted."
