The terrible performance that terrified Morgan Freeman

Even when he's starring in terrible movies, which has become more and more common in recent years, you can't often blame him for phoning it in. Then again, when Freeman makes his semi-regular forays into the direct-to-video leather business, he's not asked to do much more than stop by and rattle off a few remarks before collecting his paycheck and heading home. Even then, his voice is so damn luxurious, syrupy that it's still poetic.

Confidence is the key to success for any artist, and Freeman has always had a lot of confidence. However, there are exceptions to the rule and for The Shawshank Redemption For Star, it was a bridge too far to deal with one of William Shakespeare's most impressive texts in his early days. In the early 1980s, before that Street Smart made him a movie star, but more than two decades into his acting life, Freeman played the title role in a production of Othello.

Looking back, he was open to disparaging his own performance, calling it not only the least popular role he ever played, but also one of the worst things he ever did on stage and screen. It was an honest but understandable assessment after Freeman confessed that he had been shitting himself the entire time.

“I was only scared once,” he said Hello folks his most daunting work as an actor. “I was trying to do something that I was really ill-equipped to do, and I haven't met the actor who would be equipped to do it.” The shocking twist came from none other than Othello, but Freeman doesn't think it was him The only one who is struggling with the piece.

“I saw Sir Laurence Olivier play Othello and he's great,” Freeman said, even though the British heavyweight had taken on blackface. “But I've never seen anyone pull it off.” Raul Julia was another who received the pass mark for embodying the character, but these are the only pairs of actors Clint Eastwood's regular collaborator has ever seen who do the piece justice.

Maybe he was being too hard on himself, or maybe he was truly terrible as Othello, but it still remains a low point for Freeman on two fronts after he channeled his fear into his performance and bombarded the audience, or at least he tells it it like that.

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