Looking back on his career, the actor said Interview magazine that his teachers told him to focus on dancing because they thought it would help him gain acting work. Sadly, he confessed, “I was 22 before I took my first dance class. I had never been athletic, so I was very stiff; I still am.” In 1964, Freeman danced at the World’s Fair as a member of the Cabaret Union. Despite this, he knew there was no future for him in dancing.

Two years later, in 1966, Freeman got a job as an understudy on a tour The royal hunt for the sun and got his first taste of professional stage acting one evening in Des Moines, Iowa. He revealed: “The feeling of equality and power that washed over me that night on stage came as a revelation to me. I said to myself, ‘This is what you do. This is where you really shine. ”

Freeman’s next step was to move to New York to study theater. After auditioning for every production he could find, he made his off-Broadway debut in 1967, earning a princely $72 a week. Considering that he had been nearly starving as a penniless aspiring actor up until that point, it felt like a huge amount of money. He admitted, “I was just trying to stay alive in New York. It was great. I wasn’t hungry anymore, and neither was my dog.”

Around this time, Freeman auditioned for another Off-Broadway play, but did not get the part. Instead, a friend of his was hired. However, when this friend was unceremoniously fired, Freeman received a fateful phone call from one of the producers. To his surprise, this producer admitted, “I’m one of those who didn’t want to hire you, and that was a big mistake, so I’m going to put you on Broadway.”

In one fell swoop, Freeman had gone from not being able to find a job off-Broadway to landing a more prestigious job in an all-black Broadway production of the musical Hello, Dollie! It was a stroke of luck he had been waiting for for ten years, or maybe it was just a fair reward for the hard work he had put into his profession. Be that as it may, he claims, “That was my beginning.”

At the request of Interview when you land Hello, Dollie! was a big step for his career, Freeman humbly replied, “It was work. Every job was a big step.” From then on, though, acting started to seem like a really viable path for the young star, and it was all because a producer admitted he made a mistake.

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