A passionate horseman, he has a number of mounts on the property. “It’s where I belong.” He lives just outside the town of Charleston, on land that his grandparents owned he bought it from his parents in 1991, and built a beautiful new hacienda-style house on the site. He is so often asked the well-meaning but inescapably patronizing question of how he ever got out of Mississippi that his answer is automatic: “I took the bus!” The more intriguing question is, Why did he come back? “I realized it’s where I was happiest,” Freeman says. He sits erectly at a table, like an athlete, without the seemingly unavoidable stoop of age, and stands straight and ever so slightly imperiously. In person his famous deep, annunciatory voice is slightly quieter. He has a powerful sense of self and a charismatic blend of the gentle arrogance that comes from attaining the highest level of confidence and the humility that results from having had one’s ass kicked by life more than a few times. He has had precisely one scandal in just over seventy-four years on the planet, and that little balloon of sensationalism deflated as quickly as it was puffed up, when it was concluded that a car accident with a female passenger, around the time his twenty-four-year-long marriage was ending, was a legitimate accident, and that the woman with him was not a lover.īut Freeman is not shy. He doesn’t permeate supermarket tabloids or the infinite iterations of cable entertainment-news shows, and he’s not part of the rotting rubbish heap of celebrity gossip that’s now so ubiquitous we’ve come to think of it as reality. When he’s not in front of you either physically or on a screen, however, he’s in effect invisible, which is what is required for privacy these days. And he is certainly present in his acting, in which, exquisitely, he never seems to fill more space than he needs to, but fills that completely. He is absolutely present when you are with him-attentive, engaging. Morgan Freeman is both there and not there.
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