It wasn’t always easy for Morgan Freeman to juggle both being a father and a legendary actor.
“I’m not sure fatherhood changed me,” the Bruce Almighty actor admitted to The Telegraph in 2014, adding: “It took a while for me to become a father. I was busy trying to be an actor, and the two didn’t really go together in my youth.”
Fatherhood — and grandparenthood — have nonetheless become one of his greatest joys in the decades since first becoming a parent.
Learn all about his children below.
Alfonso Freeman
Alfonso, 66, is Morgan’s firstborn, born in 1959, to Morgan and Loletha Adkins, who primarily raised him until he was an adult. Morgan himself told Esquire in 2012: “He came out of a situation where I met this woman who had three kids of her own, started foolin’ around, and she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ So I left town. So we didn’t hook up until he was nineteen years old.”
Alfonso grew up not knowing Morgan was his dad, until Morgan himself forced an introduction, showing up on his doorstep when he was 19 years old.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Alfonso made his screen debut in 1994 on The Shawshank Redemption, which starred Morgan, and has since also appeared as august on series such as The West Wing, ER, The Practice, plus on his father’s The Bucket List (2007), his last film credit being from 2023.
He has been married twice, first to Cynthia Gafford, with whom he shares sons Alfonso II, Joshua and Donovan, from 1982 to 1989, and since 1994, he has been married to Larcenia Letice.
© Getty ImagesSaifoulaye Freeman
Saifoulaye, 66, is Morgan’s second son, born shortly after Alfonso, though his mother’s identity is not known, and Morgan similarly did not have a relationship with him when he was growing up. “I went to New York and I ran into another situation,” he further told Esquire of leaving Alfonso’s mother when he learned she was pregnant, noting: “Another kid, and I left town again.”
Little is known about Saifoulaye, who leads a private life away from the spotlight, nor his relationship with his father.
© WireImageDeena Adair
Deena, 62, is Morgan’s first wife Jeanette Adair Bradshaw’s daughter from a previous relationship, who he “adopted just as soon as I could,” he told Esquire, upon marrying his mother in 1967. The former couple divorced in 1979.
In 1996, Deena became her father’s on-set hairstylist, which turned into a full-time career, working on not just several of her father’s movies as his hairstylist, but she also was on the hairstyling team for Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (2009) and Ring of Fire (2013), both of which were nominated for Emmy Awards.
Deena welcomed daughter E’Dena Hines in 1982, though by 1988, Morgan and his second wife Myrna Colley-Lee, to whom he was married from 1984 to 2010, had adopted her, while Deena was finding her footing. E’Dena went on to become an actress after studying at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, though her life was cut short when she was only 33 years old when in 2015, she was stabbed to death over a dozen times in New York City by her on-again, off-again boyfriend Lamar Davenport, who was charged with murder and ultimately convicted of manslaughter charges, sentenced to 20 years in prison.
© Getty ImagesMorgana Freeman
Morgana, 54, was born to Morgan and his first wife in 1971. Morgan’s namesake, she has always been a public supporter of her father, attending a myriad of premieres for his films, and running Morgan’s Mississippi-based charities.
Seemingly based in Atlanta, she graduated from Spelman College in 1993, and later owned various beauty salons. She now works as a Chief Vision Officer for Morgan’s charity SonEdna Foundation which focuses on empowering the Mississippi Delta through lifelong learning, community collaboration, and economic development, and also reportedly works for his other, similar nonprofit, the Tallahatchie River Foundation.
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