20 things you didn’t know about Morgan Freeman! (List)

You can read them in the following list!

1. Morgan Freeman was born June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee.

2. After years of small parts and limited success, he began to land big roles and win critical and popular acclaim. He’s now one of Hollywood’s most respected stars.

3. He is the youngest of five children born to barber Morgan Porterfield Freeman, Sr. and schoolteacher Mayme Edna, Freeman was raised in Chicago and Mississippi in a low-income home.

4. When he was nine years old, he played the lead role in a school play.

5. Some national exposure followed in 1971, when he started appearing regularly on The Electric Company, a public television-produced children’s TV show that focused on teaching kids how to read. On a show that included such current and future stars as Rita Moreno, Joan Rivers, and Gene Wilder, Freeman had some of the show’s more memorable characters, like “Easy Reader,” “Mel Mounds” and “Count Dracula.”

6. Not long after he was born, Morgan’s parents, like so many other African-Americans struggling under the pressures of the Jim Crow south, relocated to Chicago to find work. While his parents looked for jobs, Freeman remained with his maternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi.

7. He turned down a drama scholarship at Jason State University to work as a radar mechanic in the U.S. Air Force in 1955.

8. Won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby in 2005.

9. After four years in the military, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he took acting lessons at the Pasadena Playhouse and dancing lessons in San Francisco in the early 1960s and worked as a transcript clerk at Los Angeles City College.

10. He has spoken in opposition to Black History Month, saying that black history is American history.

11.  In 1984, he received his second Obie Award for his role as the preacher in The Gospel at Colonus. Freeman also won a Drama Desk Award and a Clarence Derwent Award for his role as a wino in The Mighty Gents. He received his third Obie Award for his role as a chauffeur for a Jewish widow in Driving Miss Daisy, which was adapted for the screen in 1989.

12. He was married to Jeanette Adair Bradshaw from 1967 to 1979. He married his second wife, Myrna Colley-Lee in 1984. The couple separated in 2010.

13. As a kid, Freeman spent a good portion of his time scraping together enough money to see movies, where he formed an early admiration for actors like Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier.

14. He has three daughters named Deena, Morgana and Saifoulaye and a son named Alfonso.

15. In 1967, the same year he married Jeanette Adair Bradshaw, Freeman’s big career break came when he landed a part in an all African-American Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! starring Pearl Bailey. Around that time, Freeman also performed in an off-Broadway production of The Nigger Lovers.

16. He is also recognized for his roles in such films as The Shawshank Redemption, Glory, Unforgiven, Bruce Almighty, The Dark Knight, The Sum of All Fears and Dolphin Tale.

17. He starred alongside Tim Robbins in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.

18. He continued to be involved in theater work and received the Obie Award in 1980 for the title role in Coriolanus.

19. At the age of 6, Freeman’s grandmother died and he moved north to be with his mother, who had already separated from her alcoholic husband. They later moved to Tennessee and eventually back to Mississippi, where Mayme Edna settled her family in Greenwood.

20. Freeman made his directorial debut in 1993 with Bopha! for Paramount Pictures.