Driving Morgan Freeman

Dining on crab and pompano at a fancy restaurant, Morgan Freeman takes a moment to describe Charlie, the hit man he plays in Neil LaBute’s dark comedy “Nurse Betty.” In some respects, he could be describing himself.

“Very little impresses him,” Freeman says. “He goes out and does what he needs to do, and he goes back and works a crossword puzzle or whatever until the phone rings. He’s a businessman. He’s a professional. Keeps himself fit and ready to go for the next job.”

Freeman is 63 years old and graying around the edges but otherwise looks fit for the next job. That job usually involves wearing the white hat--the reformed felon in “The Shawshank Redemption,” the president in “Deep Impact” and a detective in such films as “Seven,” “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider.”

Of course, this is nothing new. With the notable exception of his breakthrough film, “Street Smart” (1987), in which he played a nasty pimp and prompted critic Pauline Kael to call him “the greatest American actor in movies,” Freeman always has been a sympathetic, almost fatherly figure, whether he was playing the noble chauffeur in “Driving Miss Daisy” or Easy Reader on television’s “The Electric Company.” Even Charlie is, within his own violent universe, a nice guy. He develops tender feelings toward Betty, even though he’s trying to kill her.

In the film, Renee Zellweger stars as Betty, a delusional waitress who heads to California to hook up with an actor who plays a doctor in a soap opera she believes is her former fiance. Zellweger sums up Freeman’s persona when she says, “He’s warm and sincere, and he has this calm serenity. He’s one of the first faces in my memory. As far back as I can remember there’s been a Morgan Freeman, from ‘Electric Company.’ He taught me my first noun.”

In person, Freeman doesn’t seem quite as noble as all that. But who would be? Who would want to be? Though he’s nobody’s idea of a “difficult” actor, he does have opinions, lots of them, and he goes his own way. For example, rather than living disconnected in L.A., he lives on a farm in Mississippi that belonged to his parents, and he will tell you forthrightly how they came to be in that part of the world: “My great-great-great-grandmother was bought in Virginia, taken to the area we now live in--this is before the [Civil] War was over, or even before the war--and she had these three sons, and her youngest son was my great-great-grandfather. My great-grandmother was his illegitimate [child].”

Freeman grows grass for his horses on the farm and spends winters on his sailboat in the Caribbean, on and around Grenada. He speaks French and casually compares the austere architecture of the dining room to a museum in East Berlin. Clearly he’s something of an autodidact. Higher education consisted of a stint in the Air Force in the late ‘50s--three years, eight months and 10 days, mustering out after he sat in the cockpit of T-33 jet trainer.

“[I was] just sitting on the white line up in the plane remembering John Wayne,” he says. “A moment of epiphany came when I realized that my romanticism with war was with movies. I always wanted to be in the movies. I always wanted to do that in the movies.”

The years that followed this epiphany were spent in New York on the dole and working as an office temp before finally finding work on the stage. They are perhaps best summed up in an anecdote, a memory summoned by, of all things, Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” which he thinks was a great idea marred by bad casting (yes, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman).

The film’s premise was that two people do something they would not normally have done and then deny that it ever happened. He says he was walking down the street in New York one evening when he saw a woman he used to have a relationship with getting out of a fancy car. She was “minked out,” and he was at that time “a low-end actor.” They ignored each other, perhaps out of pride more than anything.

“I was schlepping along in one of those old green acetate fake fur parkas,” he says. “It had been snowing, but it had switched to rain, so I looked bedraggled. I passed by this parking lot and this little vignette happened, one of those things that imprint themselves on your memory.”

A Directness Not Suited for Directing

Unlike many actors who are insufferably self-involved as they become successful and people tell them how wonderful they are, Freeman seems connected to the past and the present. He notices--and makes remarks about--your clothes, your shoes, the words you choose. He likes to play with people and doesn’t suffer fools gladly, which can come across to those who don’t know him--autograph seekers, the press--as intimidating, even prickly.

His directness, while admirable, has precluded a career behind the camera, even though he seems to have all of the tools for the job. He directed one film, “Bopha!,” a drama set in South Africa, and that was enough.

“You have to do some politicking, and I’m not political at all,” Freeman says about his short-lived career as a director. “I probably have listened to all of the maverick directors in the world. The first one I came into contact with was Bob Rafelson [on “Brubaker”]. He was the director of record for five weeks, and then the suits came to the set because they didn’t like what they were getting, and one of them said something off-color to him and was grabbed roughly. That very day he was off the picture. Of course, all of the mavericks are mavericks because they know that the suits don’t know doo-doo about making a movie.”

Not surprisingly Freeman likes actors’ filmmakers. Among those he mentions are Steven Spielberg (with whom he worked on “Amistad”), Walter Hill (“Johnny Handsome”), Clint Eastwood (“Unforgiven”), LaBute, and Robert Altman, with whom he’d like to work but never has. He thinks blacks have it better in Hollywood than they’ve ever had, citing as an example LaBute’s colorblind casting of him and comedian Chris Rock as his hotheaded partner (and whose competence as a dramatic actor Freeman was initially concerned about).

“I thought it was an odd combination, and I was concerned,” he says of Rock. “I like his act. I think he’s an extremely intelligent comedian, like George Carlin and Richard Pryor combined. But someone you don’t know whose rep is built on another medium, is this going to work out? It did.”

Freeman also has a few things to say about how an actor’s work is recognized. He’s been nominated for an Oscar three times, for “Street Smart,” “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” He’s never won, which, perversely, has been something of a relief to Freeman because he didn’t have to get up there and say something. But the premise behind the Oscars drives him crazy.

“The idea that you can get five outstanding pieces of work and you can turn four of them into losers, that’s wrong,” he says. “Once they get nominated, that’s it. You just go to the thing and get those awards for outstanding achievement. Five outstanding achievements, what are you going to say is best? I can’t even think of [comparing] them as apples and oranges. They’re both fruit.”

Maybe Freeman will end up in that special pantheon reserved for great actors who have never received an Oscar. That would be a pity. Meanwhile, he just keeps rolling along, co-starring next with Gene Hackman in the upcoming “Under Suspicion” and signing on to do another film as a detective, called “High Crimes.”

One of his dream projects is to play Nelson Mandela in a film based on his autobiography. Mandela and Freeman became friendly after he saw “Bopha!” Apparently Mandela saw something in the director of that film that he liked. Part of Freeman’s likability is the pleasure he takes in doing what he does, whether it’s sailing, making fun of one’s shoes, or, especially, acting.

“I’d do it for nothing, I know I would,” he says. “I’ll always do it. I’ll find a hole somewhere, a bar, I’ll find someplace to get up and fool around with other people who are as crazy as I am. Yes.”