For the director, see Morgan J. Freeman

His third release was the biographical drama Lean on Me, in which he portrays the principal of an under-performing and drug- and crime-ridden New Jersey high school. Jane Galbraith of Variety magazine thought Freeman’s casting was “wonderful”.[39] Lastly in 1989, he starred in Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome, a crime drama in which he plays a New Orleans police officer.[40] In a 1990 interview, Freeman said that Glory was one of his favorite releases—”The Black legacy is as noble, is as heroic, is as filled with adventure and conquest and discovery as anybody else’s. It’s just that nobody knows it.”[14] In 1990, Freeman provided the voice of Frederick Douglass in The Civil War, a television miniseries about the American Civil War.[41] In the same year he played a key role in the critically panned The Bonfire of the Vanities. According to the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 16% based on 51 reviews.[42] In the summer of 1990, he played Petruchio, a role he had been thinking about for six years, in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, which opened at Delacorte theater in New York City. “[Petruchio] seems to have a lot of fun in life”, he said.[43] In 1991, Freeman had a supporting role in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, an action-adventure starring Kevin Costner. The film was a commercial success,[44] but garnered mixed reviews from critics; The New York Times’ Vincent Canby thought Freeman played Azeem with “wit and humor” despite the “muddled” plot.[45]