Street Smart & Stage Smart

Show time here on a cold January night at the John Houseman Theatre on 42nd Street: The wise, elderly chauffeur for a crotchety, even more elderly Jewish widow in Atlanta creaks about the stage.

Oscar time in Hollywood: “For Your Consideration” ads abound there, aimed at those who will vote on the Academy Award nominees. One ad, from Cannon Films for best supporting actor, cites the hard-eyed black man seen holding a gun to Christopher Reeve’s head.

Two different worlds. Same man--Morgan Freeman. He made his stage debut at age 8 in a school production of “Little Boy Blue.” His film debut was in 1965 as an extra--a cigarette-smoking man whom Rod Steiger passed on a Harlem street in “The Pawnbroker.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a movie actor,” says Freeman, whom Cannon is Oscar-touting for his powerful portrayal of a Times Square pimp in “Street Smart,” a film that had a short run last year.

But Freeman, currently motoring Off Broadway in “Driving Miss Daisy,” got his start in the theater and says, “My home has become the stage. Not really through choice, but through circumstance.”

He has three Obie awards--Off Broadway’s reply to Broadway’s Tony--of which the latest was for “Miss Daisy,” which he began last April and will still be in when Oscar nominations are announced Feb. 17.

Were awards edible, Freeman, a lean, graceful man of 50, might have a weight problem. The New York, Los Angeles and national film critics’ societies already have given him supporting-actor honors for “Street Smart.”

In the minds of some, that may make him a potential Oscar contender in a category where those who speculate on such things think Sean Connery (“The Untouchables”), Albert Brooks (“Broadcast News”) and Vincent Gardenia (“Moonstruck”) also are in the running.

This is light years away from growing up black in the segregated South, specifically rural Greenwood, Miss., where Freeman at age 12 competed in a statewide acting competition and won a best-actor pin.

He still has the pin. But back then, he was just as interested in winning Air Force pilot wings. He was fascinated by jet fighters as a kid, he says with a grin. “I used to think the F-86 was one of the baddest things in the air.”

So he enlisted in the Air Force, intending to become an aviation cadet. His first orientation ride in a T-33 jet trainer changed his mind, for only then, he says, did the ultimate purpose of jet fighters--to kill--sink in.

“It turned out that wasn’t what I wanted to do at all,” Freeman says.

Goodby Air Force, hello acting: “It was always going to be acting or flying. I never had any other ambitions.”

Freeman’s only formal training in acting was in Los Angeles, after he mustered out of the military. He wasn’t a good student, he says, although acting school did some good--helped him lose his thick Southern accent, lowered the timbre of his voice and taught him to be at ease on stage.

“But I think you learn acting by acting--OJT,” he says, using the military acronym for on-the-job training.

He is one of the lucky ones in a profession in which an estimated 80% of its members are unemployed at any given time, and where roles for blacks in mainstream plays and films are few and far between.

His career started to roll in 1967 when he triumphed Off Broadway in a play called “Niggerlovers,” and then, in the same year, made his Broadway debut with Pearl Bailey in “Hello, Dolly!”

But five years ago, after years of relatively steady work on Broadway, Off Broadway, TV and the occasional film, times got so lean that he almost wound up changing professions.

He’d made a film in 1980 with Cicely Tyson. It had what proved to be an ironic title, “Welcome to Success.”

“I came back to New York, and that was the end,” he says, emphasizing the word end , “of my working career.” He didn’t work again for two years.

The usual suspects in an abrupt career halt for an actor who has previously found a measure of success are booze, drugs or both.

“There was a suspect, but not the jug or drugs,” Freeman says. “It was my mouth.”

The woe began at an audition for a role in the remake of the ‘50s horror film “The Thing.” He’d taken to heart his agent’s suggestion that, if asked his opinion about a script offered him, he speak his mind. So when the people auditioning him asked what he thought, he told them.

What struck him about the script, he said, was that “here we have a base in Antarctica and eight of the 12 men there are white scientists. The other four are black--one’s a mechanic, another is a cook, and the others are other kinds of grunts. What do you imagine I think?”

There ensued silence, he recalls, “and I just let the silence sit there . . . but that became an exercise in futility all the way around. . . . I don’t know what I was looking for. I was hoping for something better.”

Although three of his four kids from a previous marriage were grown and gone, he still had the fourth to raise. There also was the rent and sundry other steadily mounting expenses to pay.

At one point, the respected actor who now drives Miss Daisy thought seriously of driving a cab for a living.

But in October of 1982, the clouds began parting. There was a small part on a soap opera. Paul Newman had him read for “Harry and Son” and wound up casting him in a role originally written as a white character.

“Immediately after that I was asked to do a play at the American Place Theater,” Freeman says. After that came 18 months of steady work as a regular on the NBC soap opera “Another World.” “The old ‘when-it-rains-it-pours,’ ” he says, grinning.

Freeman takes the Academy Award preliminaries now under way with a grain of salt. He went through similar prelims in 1978 when nominated for a Tony for his portrayal in “Mighty Gents” of a battered but still feisty wino.

He didn’t win.

For this reason, even if he’s nominated for Hollywood’s top honor, he doesn’t plan to attend that tuxedo junction called the Oscar show when it is held April 11 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.

He plans to be on Broadway then, God and critics willing, in “The Gospel at Colonus,” in which he won an Obie in 1984 when it first ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“If I’m working,” he says with wry smile, “I think I would prefer to be here working--rather than sitting out there, wondering if somebody is going to name me as being better than whoever also is sitting out there.”