_In 1980, Morgan Freeman made an indelible impression in his first movie, the liberal-hearted prison picture Brubaker. He had a one-scene role as a crazed inmate who takes another prisoner (David Keith) hostage. Messed-up but still compelling, Brubaker has a remarkable supporting cast, but there’s nothing like Freeman’s three-minute number, a kind of psychotic blues that has the instant effect of blurring out almost any other violent madman bit you’ve ever seen on the screen.

His physical presence is so wild and unstable—he draws stiff, wide arcs with his flailing arms—that you’re not prepared for the stalking-tiger suddenness and precision of his aggressive movements: he’s grabbed Keith (who is no weakling) before you’ve had time to grasp what the hell’s going on. This isn’t the displaced urban insanity we’re used to seeing in movies, like the street crazy whom Paul Newman defuses early (and memorably) in Fort Apache, the Bronx. Freeman’s prison loony, waiting for his moment to strike, his madness exacerbated by his having been put in a cage, where he’s held himself in silent abeyance, suggests a spirit distinctly rural and Southern and primitive, something out of folklore. He could be the brooding, lethal avenger from a Robert Johnson ballad.

When you watch a truly great actor, you can’t tell where instinct leaves off and intellect begins. The chroniclers of Olivier’s career always write about the brilliance (and daring) of his choices, but his secret wasn’t just that no one else would have taken his approach to Richard III or Othello or Archie Rice; no one else could have carried it off. A performer like Olivier or Brando, or in today’s reigning generation of actors, Daniel Day-Lewis or Anjelica Huston, makes choices in the blood as much as in the head, absorbing each character so deeply and fully that any alterations in the body, enormous or minute, appear to be automatic, instinctual creature adjustments to new stimuli. Technically, of course, these are “choices”; the way we experience the performance, however, and the way the actor seems to experience it, there is no choice but the behavior we observe. That’s the magic of great acting: its inevitability. Morgan Freeman’s responses go at the speed of an electric current; he’s so far ahead of us that we’re always a little dazed when we watch him.

This quality is clearest in his portrayal of Fast Black, the New York pimp in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1986 Street Smart—the role that brought him recognition in Hollywood and still, I think, the best work he’s done in movies. Early on, we see Fast Black intermpt a john who’s administering a savage beating to one of his hookers. The pimp soothes the john with a slippery apology and fake humility—he soaps the client down—and then he throws him a couple of swift, cool kicks to disable him. When the man dies of a heart attack, Fast Black is amazed; he didn’t think he’d hit the man hard enough to do any permanent damage. We’re bewildered, too: where did his lethal power come from? The answer is laid open for us some scenes later, when he is leading the magazine journalist, Jonathan Fisher (Christopher Reeves), who’s the movie’s protagonist, on a cruise through the neighborhood. Fast Black gets into a friendly game of basketball and, blocked by one of the other players, turns on the poor bastard, slams him up against a wall, and terrifies him half to death.The turnabout in Freeman’s mood and body language comes at such a breathless speed you can’t see it; his temper really is a bat out of hell. Watching the scene again recently, I had to rerun it twice to catch the precise moment when the shift occurs. It’s there, all right, but is so quick it’s effectively subliminal. Freeman’s Fast Black springs at the same time as he registers that the young man’s an obstacle to his move toward the basket; he practically flies through the air to pounce. Much of the deadliness of Fast Black’s attacks, of course, comes from his victims’ slowness to realize when they’ve turned into the enemy.

Freeman’s entire performance in Street Smart is built on Fast Black’s unpredictability. It’s a great tool for prying open the character; it gives the actor a phenomenally wide field to traverse in the course of the picture, where he can take on one role after another, darting among them without warning. Except for the violent fury he directs alternately at the homeboy in the basketball game, at his whores, and (finally) at Jonathan, and a few moments of relaxation at a Harlem hash joint, where his easy command is reminiscent of Mafia patriarchs holding court over pasta in hundreds of gangster films, every persona Fast Black adopts appears to be a mockery of the people around him. He puts on the greasy street charm for Jonathan, who’s written a profile of a fictional pimp that the D.A. prosecuting Fast Black for the john’s murder thinks is a hidden portrait of his defendant. Fast Black knows Jonathan hasn’t a clue about how pimps really operate; he needs the reporter for his own purposes (part of his lawyer’s strategy to obfuscate the facts of the case, which is the only way he can get Fast Black off), so he gives him a New York street show. (The movie’s title is a gag of sorts, since Jonathan, who ends up as a TV personality with a news spot called “Street Smart,” is a naif next to Fast Black. Flashily, trashily entertaining, the film stops working—as anything but a showcase for Freeman and the talented Kathy Baker as a whore named Punchy—once it tries to make you buy Jonathan’s cleverness in springing a trap to defeat the pimp.) But the moment Jonathan makes the slightest interference in Fast Black’s operations, objecting to his roughing up a hooker he thinks has been holding out on him, the pimp drops his gracious-host glad-handing and reveals the serpent coiled at the bottom, eyes steely-cold, tongue darting. You feel the way Jonathan must feel: as if you were continually being hoodwinked by a mirage that unexpectedly dissolves and leaves you face to face with your worst nightmare.

Since few people saw Freeman in Brubaker, his staggering performance in Street Smart seemed to come out of nowhere. But he’d been around. Born in Memphis and raised, in turns, in Greenwood, Mississippi, and Chicago, he began to study acting in L.A. in 1959, after a stint in the air force, and had his first professional job at a rep company in San Francisco. He danced there and in New York. His early stage credits, in the sixties and seventies, were divided between straight plays (a touring company of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, A Taste of Honey at the Stowe Playhouse, The Nigger Lovers with Stacy Keach off- Broadway, Shakespeare and Bracht and a Tony-nominated part in The Mighty Gents) and musicals (the all-black version of Hello, Dolly! with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway, Purlie with Cleavon Little and Melba Moore). I’ve only seen him on stage once. It wasn’t in his famous performance as Hoke in the original New York production of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, which he repeated in the 1989 movie (he was sick the day I bought tickets to see the show), but as the narrator in the 1988 revival of the musical The Gospel at Colonus, a retelling of the Oedipus myth. Colonus didn’t have much else to recommend it besides Freeman, and it didn’t provide him with much of a role, either. But I remember the wit in his line readings, and his Baptist-preacher energy, and his effortless command.

Freeman did a lot of television work before Street Smart, including a regular stint on the children’s show The Electric Company, and, between Brubaker and Street Smart, he had small roles in four other movies: Eyewitness, Teachers, Marie, and That Was Then...This Is Now. There’s not much to any of the four (if you blink, you’ll miss him as the school board’s lawyer in Teachers), but if you watch them back to back, you’ll be astounded at how radically different he is in each one. As a pipe-smoking cop in Eyewitness, he uses his wonderful elongated body languidly, leaning against door frames with the learned patience of a man who spends most of his days waiting for developments, and has so much rapport with his long-time partner (the marvelously understated Steven Hill) that they can finish each other’s sentences. But his fretting eyes clue you in to how much he cares about things. The movie, an unconvincing lump at the center, is richly detailed around the edges, and one of the loveliest details is the moment, which seems to drift in on the wind, when Freeman’s Lieutenant Black confides to his partner that he and his wife have decided to adopt, and he’s worried that he won’t love the kid as much as he would one of his own. In Teachers he has a thick, slick smile, and something moist and penetrating lingers in the room after he’s left, like whatever oil he uses on his hair. Always persuasively in character (and never calling attention to himself), he hangs around the corners of the muckraking docudrama Marie, in which he’s cast as Tennessee’s corrupt parole board chairman, Charles Trauber. But he only gets one real scene, on the witness stand, where Trauber struggles to protect his job by retreating while holding his ground—a neat trick. (It’s fascinating to see him play a weakling, however briefly, since he normally conveys so much power on camera.)

As Charlie, the pool-hall proprietor who befriends the two teen heroes of the S. E. Hinton-based That Was Then... This Is Now, Freeman creates, in a crease of the movie’s plot, a convincing romantic character, quietly but almost fanatically devoted to the people he’s brought into his life (the boys, and the girlfriend he courts off screen, whom we only hear about). The film is painfully bad, and the rest of the acting seems hopelessly labored, all pointless gestures, next to Freeman’s unself-conscious character work. When, somewhere in the middle, someone shoots Charlie, you know you can get up and go home.

The key to great character acting, where actors effect complete transformations from role to role, isn’t in flamboyant, “telling” details, like the ones a boring, obvious, superficial performer like Eric Bogosian switches around as he moves from one character to another in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. The key lies equally in the degree of submersion into the character, and in how dramatic you can make the process of inhabiting that character’s skin. When Morgan Freeman plays Rawlins, the sergeant in Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick)’s all-black 54th Cavalry in the stirring Civil War drama Glory, or the cynical cop who dogs Mickey Rourke in Johnny Handsome, or the drug rehab counselor on Michael Keaton’s case in Clean and Sober, he dramatizes patience, in its various forms (endurance in Glory, amused time-biding in Johnny Handsome, vigilance in Clean and Sober). These performances are the opposite of what he does in Street Smart or, in miniature, Brubaker: They don’t contain hidden springs. Here the drama is in the way, in Clean and Sober, he looks over his shoulder at Michael Keaton, who refuses to acknowledge his substance dependency and has ducked out of a group session to call his dealer; or in the way, in Johnny Handsome, he removes his shades and beams at Elizabeth McGovern, whom he’s about to grill on the activities of her ex-con boyfriend (Mickey Rourke). It’s in the way he scores his own tempo to counter that of his co-stars: he’s low-key to balance Keaton’s coke-accelerated rhythm, laid-back to spar with intense Forest Whitaker, who plays the sweet-souled doctor in Johnny Handsome, even-keeled to rein in the passions of Denzel Washington and Andre Braugher in Glory.

Glory's Rawlins, with his quiet store of wisdom, could be a self-mythologizing trap for another actor, but Freeman humanizes everything about the character, and plays against big effects. So though you can see Rawlins is an embodiment of the black man’s ability to withstand the brutality of his treatment and hang on to his humanity (in Rawlins’s case, without growing bitter or giving up hope), these emblematic qualities shine through the human being. The performance works the way the finest naturalists in every medium have always tried to work, by generalizing to something universal through the familiarity of the particular, the specific. Glory, which Edward Zwick directed, demonstrates how you can revivify platitudes by altering their context—how the old jingoistic cliches of the war movie can gather fresh meaning (and move us once more) when black men rather than white are filling the uniforms. That’s the point of the movie. And the work of the remarkable actors in it parallels the film’s achievement in making that point; more than that, they really make it possible.

Freeman gets a lot of comic mileage out of his role in Johnny Handsome. It’s his funniest performance so far, I think, though it’s inlaid in a very stupid movie (directed by Walter Hill), an overwrought film noir that’s desperate to be a Greek tragedy. Basically, Freeman and Forest Whitaker play Johnny’s evil and benevolent geniuses. Whitaker saves ugly Johnny’s life and gives him a new face, then sends him back into society with the conviction that he can change his ways if he starts anew without the stigma of deformed looks. Freeman keeps Johnny in his sights and goads him to seek revenge on the ex-partners who murdered his best friend and tried to get him killed, too. The humor Freeman brings to the part rescues it (poor Whitaker, also a terrific actor, takes the fall for his earnest role). And in the coda, when Johnny’s given his own life to complete the vengeance he’s been dreaming of, Freeman’s tough cop shows a surprising amount of sympathy for the dead man. Bent over the body, he says “Well, Johnny, that damn doctor didn’t understand this part, did he?,” and the irony that runs through Freeman’s line readings like a vein turns suddenly tender.

You can never guess what Freeman will uncover in a role. He cobbles together some fine moments even in horrible movies: his silent face-off with a sadistic guard who’s failed to catch him smuggling tobacco to his fellow prisoners in the South Africa-set The Power of One; a look of pained tolerance which, as the emigrant Moor, Azeem, he throws his new Christian acquaintances in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. (He looks a little like an English butler reacting to the follies of a misbehaving master.) He’s good in much of Lean on Me, where he plays Joe Clark, the aggressive principal of Paterson, New Jersey’s Eastside High, but for once his skill isn’t welcome: it exacerbates the movie’s crusading sentimentalizing of the real Joe Clark. The movie’s a snow job, and the director, John G. Avildsen (who made the equally fake The Power of One), lets Freeman do his dirty work for him.

The surprises in his most celebrated performance, opposite Jessica Tandy in Bruce Beresford’s justifiably praised film of Driving Miss Daisy, are of an entirely different order. It’s true that Freeman never repeats himself, but here he doesn’t just alter his personality, his tempo, his physicality, his vocal equipment—he seems to change his style, too. In Street Smart and Glory, he’s a consummate naturalist, a method actor who’s burrowed into the center of the character and worked his way outward. As Hoke the chauffeur, he seems to start with exterior of the character—with his way of pursing his lips and folding his back and forth, in and out of a smile, as if his face were origami; with his hobbling, old-cart-horse walk, arms swinging a little stiffly, like a scarecrow’s; with his high, light voice, grounded by a few golden baritone notes; with his twittering laugh, which either slips away into the corners of his mouth or fans out into a full-blown high-time guffaw. For the first few scenes, you almost think you’re watching an expert piece of caricature—- but there’s depth of feeling in every line and motion. His readings have the understated polish of routines by a great vaudevillian like Bert Williams or Will Rogers (neither was a caricaturist), and his face has a weathered sheen. This is style with meaning: Freeman’s performance is about how a black man in Georgia in the forties and fifties preserves his dignity, operates on his intelligence, refuses to be treated on less than human terms, and yet never gives offense. Hoke isn’t the kind of black character whose very bearing carries the assurance of natural rights, like Faulkner’s Lucas Beauchamp as Juano Hernandez played him in the 1949 Intruder in the Dust; still, what he stands for—what he is—is another kind of alternative to Uncle Tom.

The teamwork of Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy in this movie is one of the sweetest surprises in any American movie of the past few years. It’s the first time Freeman has been given a starring role and a performer who can match him. (He’s really a supporting player in Glory.) Perhaps that’s why his work here has a joy that even Street Smart comes short of: his partnership with Jessica Tandy complements him.