Who is Morgan Freeman ?

Actor, director and narrator Morgan Freeman was born on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Morgan Freeman teamed with Christopher Walken and William H. Macy for the comedy The Maiden Heist, which was released direct to video due to financial problems with the distribution company.

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.

In 2008, Freeman returned to Broadway to co-star with Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher for a limited engagement of Clifford Odets's play, The Country Girl, directed by Mike Nichols.

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.

He had wanted to do a film based on Nelson Mandela for some time. At first he tried to get Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom adapted into a finished script, but it was not finalized. In 2007, he purchased the film rights to a book by John Carlin, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Clint Eastwood directed the Nelson Mandela bio-pic titled Invictus, starring Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as rugby team captain Francois Pienaar.

While his parents looked for jobs, Freeman remained with his maternal grandmother in Charleston, Mississippi.

From his early life, Freeman has two extramarital children; one of them is Alfonso Freeman.

At the age of six, Freeman's grandmother died and he moved north to be with his mother, who had already separated from her alcoholic husband.

Morgan Freeman was married to Jeanette Adair Bradshaw from October 22, 1967, until November 18, 1979.

They later moved to Tennessee and eventually back to Mississippi, where Mayme Edna settled her family in Greenwood.

Morgan Freeman married Myrna Colley-Lee on June 16, 1984.

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.

Morgan Freeman and Colley-Lee had adopted Freeman's step-granddaughter from his first marriage and together helped to raise her.

It was by chance that Freeman himself got into acting. He was in junior high school and, as punishment for pulling out a chair from underneath a girl he had a crush on, Freeman was ordered to participate in the school's drama competition.

In 2008, the TV series African American Lives 2 revealed that some of Freeman's great-great-grandparents were slaves who migrated from North Carolina to Mississippi.

To his surprise, and probably school administrators, the 12-year-old proved to be an immediate natural on the stage, taking top honors in the program.

Freeman also discovered that his Caucasian maternal great-great-grandfather had lived with, and was buried beside, Freeman's African-American great-great-grandmother (the two could not legally marry at the time, in the segregated South).

while Freeman loved to act, flying—in particular the idea of being a fighter pilot—was in his heart of hearts.

so, upon graduating high school in 1955, Morgan turned down a partial drama scholarship and joined the U.S. Air Force.

Morgan Freeman lives in Charleston, Mississippi, and New York City.

The military, though, proved to be much different than what he'd expected.

Morgan Freeman owns and operates Ground Zero, a blues club, located in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

. Morgan Freeman formerly co-owned Madidi, a fine dining restaurant, also in Clarksdale.

Instead of darting around the skies, Freeman was relegated to on-the-ground activity as a mechanic and radar technician.