Actor: Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman was fifty before Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy made him a film star, having spent years in theatre and on the children’s programme The Electric Company. The lateness matters: he arrived with a settled authority that younger actors have to manufacture.
Glory, The Shawshank Redemption and Se7en established the register, and his Shawshank narration is so widely imitated that it has become shorthand for a certain kind of reflective voiceover.
He won Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby, in which he narrates again, and the film uses the warmth of the voice to disguise where it is going.
He has directed once and produced regularly, and the sheer volume of narration work has made his voice one of the most recognisable in the world.
