, Morgan Freeman insists he was not a late bloomer."I bloomed very early. It's just that so few people bothered to notice," says Freeman, who is currently starring in Amistad and opens Friday in the action thriller Hard Rain.

"People were asking who I was. I had an impressive resume I could show anyone who really wanted an answer.

"Before I got the nomination for Street Smart, I had my Tony nominations and my Obie awards.

"I was a respected New York stage actor, but in this business nothing counts until you've made it in the movies."

In the short decade since Street Smart, Freeman has received two more Oscar nominations for Driving Miss Daisy and The Shawshank Redemption.

He starred in such box-office hits as Outbreak, Unforgiven, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Kiss the Girls, as well as Chain Reaction, Moll Flanders, Glory and Lean on Me.

"I spent my whole youth watching movies," recalls Freeman, who grew up in both Charleston, Miss. and Chicago. His parents lived in Chicago but he was raised by his grandparents in Charleston.

"It was the '40s and, like thousands of Southern blacks, my parents had migrated to the North where there was work in the factories.

"I used to visit my mother in the summers, and I could go to a different movie every day if I could find enough bottles to make the 12 cents the movies cost.

"Two Coca-Cola bottles and a beer bottle were my movie money."

In the darkened theatres, Freeman watched his heroes Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and William Powell win the hearts of women and save the day for the underprivileged.

"My favorite movies were anything to do with flying, which explains why I joined the air force when I was 18."

After his stint in the armed forces, spent mostly in an office, a disillusioned Freeman travelled to Los Angeles to realize his dream of becoming an actor.

"It was the late '50s and I knew nothing about the business. I tried to audition for everything. A couple of days would go by before I'd realize I hadn't eaten anything, but I was determined to be an actor."

Freeman finally got steady work on the children's TV show The Electric Company.

"The job literally drove me to drink. It was so undemanding I began drinking. I thought this was all I would ever get."

Freeman moved to New York and waited two decades before he came back to Hollywood and made his mark.

"It's great to be wanted. It's great to have choices."

Freeman says there was no debate about his playing the abolitionist in Amistad.

"I was almost willing to pay Steven Spielberg just so I could be in the film. It's an important film because it looks so honestly at the whole concept of slavery.

"My great-great-great grandmother was a Virginia slave who was bought by a Colonel Wright and taken to Mississippi.

"Slavery is just one more sad statement of man's inhumanity to man."

With Hard Rain, Freeman returns to the action genre that constantly sees him squiring young white stars such as Keanu Reeves in Chain Reaction, Brad Pitt in Seven and Christian Slater in both Robin Hood and Hard Rain.

"These action thrillers are fun. They're the kind of movies that fuelled my imagination as a child, so I want to be part of that process for a whole new generation."


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