Morgan Freeman
Born: 1 June 1937
Where: Memphis, Tennessee
The Oscar-winning star left his breakthrough performance until quite late in life - he was 50 when he gave a villainous acclaimed performance in Street Smart.
Now he's viewed as a reliable pair of hands, lending gravitas to movies that deserve it (The Shawshank Redemption) and those that don't (Dreamcatcher).
At the age of 12, he had won a state-wide drama competition but turned down a partial scholarship in drama from Jackson State University to serve in the Air Force.
In 1965, he worked as an extra on the feature film, The Pawnbroker, and a few years later made his Broadway debut in Hello, Dolly!
A New York stage actor for most of his career, Morgan made his film debut in 1971 with Who Says I Can't Ride a Rainbow?
But his movie breakthrough came at the age of 50 playing the villain Fast Black - a pimp in 1987's Street Smart.
The menacing role earned him an Oscar nomination for supporting actor, but his next Oscar bid - two years later for Driving Miss Daisy - changed the way producers were willing to cast him.
He made his directorial debut with the story of a black South African policeman and his son divided by apartheid, in Bopha!
The following year, Morgan received another best actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Red, a prison lifer in the moving drama The Shawshank Redemption.
He received praise for his work as a cop tracking a serial killer with novice partner Brad Pitt in Seven.
He also appeared as the mysterious Hibble (a character not in the original novel) in the screen adaptation of Moll Flanders and as a enigmatic benefactor of a university's research project in Chain Reaction.
Next Freeman got the chance to headline a film, cast as the police detective and psychologist Alex Cross in the above average thriller Kiss the Girls .
Steven Spielberg tapped the actor's innate moral rectitude for the role of an abolitionist in Amistad.
Director Mimi Leder saw him as the perfect figure to lend dignity and leadership to a world in crisis as the US President coping with an impending meteor crash in Deep Impact.
He and Gene Hackman served double duty as co-producers and co-stars in the cat and mouse drama Under Suspicion.
Freeman offered a terrific performance as a hit man who obsesses over the woman he has targeted to kill in Nurse Betty.
Following his reprise of Alex Cross in the prequel Along Came a Spider, the actor reteamed with Kiss the Girls co-star Ashley Judd in High Crimes.
Next he was cast as yet another bureaucrat, this time the CIA director, in The Sum of All Fears.
He also gave a better performance that the film merited in the supernatural thriller Dreamcatcher based on the novel by Stephen King.
In 2002, he played a deranged pastor in Ed Solomon's feature debut Levity and went on to deliver an Oscar-winning performance in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby.
Freeman played a blind piano tuner in the action thriller Unleashed and portrayed the gadgets expert Marcus Fox in Batman Begins.
Recent work includes the thriller Lucky Number Slevin opposite Josh Hartnett and Bruce Willis.
