Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman was born in 1937 and did not become a film actor of any consequence until he was past fifty. Between 1971 and 1977 he appeared on The Electric Company, a PBS series that taught children to read, playing Easy Reader and a disc jockey called Mel Mounds among others. It paid the bills and made him recognisable to an audience that would not see much of him again for fifteen years. The stage work ran alongside it, and that is where the reputation was actually built.

Street Smart in 1987 changed the terms. He played a pimp called Fast Black, a genuinely frightening piece of work, and it brought a Best Supporting Actor nomination. In the same year he created the role of Hoke Colburn in Alfred Uhry's play Driving Miss Daisy off-Broadway, which won him a fourth Obie. Two years later he played Hoke again on film, took the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a musical or comedy and a second Oscar nomination, and appeared in Glory within the same twelve months.

After that the parts came in the right size. Unforgiven in 1992, then The Shawshank Redemption in 1994, which underperformed in cinemas and then spent a decade becoming the film people name first. It brought a third nomination and a voice that has been imitated ever since. Se7en followed in 1995. The win came late: Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby at the ceremony in February 2005, playing a former fighter who keeps the gym. He was sixty-seven, and it was his fourth nomination.

The then-and-now angle for Freeman is unusual because the now is considerably longer than the then. He played Nelson Mandela in Invictus in 2009 for a fifth nomination, spent the same decade as Lucius Fox across three Batman films, and narrated a great deal of everything else. The honours then arrived in a queue: Kennedy Center Honors in 2008, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2011, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2012, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2018. He started late and never stopped.