In The Driver's Seat

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

There were few black faces on the big screen back in the 1940s, when young Morgan Freeman collected soda bottles to pay his way into the local movie matinee. And the one or two who did appear made the young moviegoer squirm. He did not object to their playing servants, jobs his own parents had occasionally held, but it bothered him that these celluloid domestics were presented as empty caricatures, devoid of human dignity. "I didn't know anybody who acted like that," recalls Freeman.

Good roles for black actors are still hard to come by, but audiences currently have a chance to see two unusually full-bodied movie portrayals of the black experience: Driving Miss Daisy, the critically acclaimed drama about the 25-year relationship between an elderly Southern Jewish woman and her black chauffeur, and Glory, a stirring account of the first black regiment to serve in the Civil War. Morgan Freeman, now 52, stars in both.

In less capable hands, John Rawlins, the illiterate gravedigger who becomes a sergeant major in Glory, and Hoke Colburn, the courtly chauffeur in Miss Daisy, could have become sterile symbols of good intentions. But Freeman's performances are so finely calibrated that these characters emerge as men of true heft and substance. Says Glory director Edward Zwick: "Morgan inhabits a role rather than performs it."

Although he took acting classes when starting out, Freeman follows no special school of acting. "I read Stanislavsky recently," he says, referring to the high guru of acting technique, "but that business of peeling away layers of skin was too murky and deep for me. I haven't found that I've had to do that in any intellectual sense. What I do, I do intuitively. It just comes easy for me."

Freeman first fell in love with acting in the third grade, when he played the title role in a school play, Little Boy Blue. Teachers along the way encouraged him to channel his rambunctiousness into acting, and after a brief stint in the Air Force he headed for Hollywood, naively believing he could get an acting job just by showing up at a studio. But he wasn't pretty like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte, the black leading men of the day, and he soon realized that his chances would be better in New York City's grittier theater scene.

There Freeman found steady employment. He sometimes did what he calls dungeon work, appearing in small workshop productions in dusty church basements and drafty warehouse lofts, but he also performed in an all-black cast of Hello Dolly! and with a multiracial theater company at the New York Shakespeare Festival. "He had very good speech, bore himself with a certain grace and looked like a king," recalls producer Joseph Papp.

On his agent's advice, Freeman passed up the black-exploitation films of the early 1970s and instead took the role of the hip character Easy Reader on the public-television series The Electric Company. The job provided a steady income and made Freeman so famous with the preteen set that, to his great chagrin, he is still stopped in the street by fans. After a while, he felt trapped, hungering for meatier roles but needing the money to put bread on the table for his wife and two daughters. He began drinking heavily. "I'm not an alcoholic or anything," he says. "But I can get out of control." One morning in 1975 he awoke to find himself lying on the floor, passed out from the previous night's binge. Freeman stopped drinking cold turkey. The series ended too, and soon he was back to serious acting.

His big break seemed to come in 1978, when Actors' Equity named him best male newcomer of the season for his powerful performance as a disillusioned wino in the short-lived Broadway drama The Mighty Gents. Freeman was 40, and he thought he had finally made it. Instead, a two-year drought followed. He was considering chucking the business and driving a cab, when offers began to dribble in. Then, along came the role of Fast Black, the mercurial pimp, in the movie Street Smart.

Taking the part seemed an odd choice for Freeman, who had remained prickly about the kinds of roles offered to black actors, but in Fast Black he saw a chance to flesh out the stereotype. "I had no intention of wearing crushed- velvet jump suits, big hats or high-heeled pumps," he says. But the changes went far beyond the cosmetic, as Freeman transformed what could have been another cliched pimp caricature into a harrowing portrait of a desperately brutal man. The performance won three major critics awards, an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and Freeman his first crack at a starring role as the bat-toting New Jersey high school principal Joe Clark in last year's commercial success Lean on Me.

Insiders are predicting that Freeman will win another Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the chauffeur in Miss Daisy, a role he originated in the off- Broadway production, and producers have anointed him a bankable star. "People will be making parts for Morgan," declares producer Richard Zanuck. But Freeman has heard such talk before, and he is taking all the praise in stride. Recently, he, his second wife, costume designer Myrna Colley-Lee, and their seven-year-old granddaughter E'Dena began to live part time on their 38-ft. ketch Sojourner, which is moored in the Caribbean. "When you live in the world of make-believe, you need something real," says Freeman. "I go sailing, I'm in the real world."