The Unexpected Adventures of Martin Freeman

A
s one of the most revered and popular actors in Great Britain, Martin Freeman is not only a household name but a national treasure.

An actor in the grand tradition of such contemporary theatrical greats as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman can exercise his obvious thespian talents in theatre just as well as in TV or film and even the radio. He is a character actor who can in one year appear in a comedy film, only to then star in an epic fantasy-film series and a darkly twisted American drama. He is Dr John Watson, Lester Nygaard, Bilbo Baggins and Arthur Dent. Much like the late Alec Guinness, Martin Freeman is a chameleon who can hop from one role to the next with considerable aplomb.

As is the case with just about anyone in the arts-and-entertainment
industry, Freeman was a jobbing actor before he found his footing and made a name for himself in such notable shows as
Sherlock
and
Fargo
. But what prompted him to become an actor? What drives him to commit to such a varied range of roles? Who is Martin Freeman?

Martin John Christopher Freeman was born on 8 September 1971 in Aldershot, Hampshire. He was the youngest of five children. His parents, Philomena (née Norris) and Geoffrey Freeman, a naval officer, separated when Freeman was a child.

‘It didn’t seem strange at the time but I suppose it is,’ Freeman admitted to the
London Evening Standard
’s Bruce Dessau in 2005 concerning his parents’ separation. ‘It was just the way things were. It was quite a civilised separation and when my mum was back on her feet financially, I moved back with her.’

Freeman was a creative and imaginative child and those talents would later manifest themselves in his lengthy body of work as an actor.

‘Dreams can be extremely vivid, so that’s why they’re so troubling to us some of the time and why they’re so real,’ Freeman explained to the
NYC Movie Guru
in 2007. ‘When I was six years old, I woke up and my family had just bought a donkey and we kept it in the kitchen – then I woke up [for real] and went downstairs and I was like, “Where’s the donkey?” I think it’s the Australian Aborigines who considered dreamed time to be actually more pertinent to life than waking life because it can tell you so much about your life and what your fears and hopes are.’

After the divorce Freeman lived with his dad but, sadly, when
Martin was just ten years old, his father died of a heart attack. The family then moved to the outskirts of South London and Freeman settled back in with his mother and stepfather James, who ran pubs.

When Martin Freeman appeared in a 2009 episode of the popular BBC genealogy series
Who Do You Think You Are?
he learned that his grandfather, Leonard Freeman, was a medic during World War II. Leonard was part of an ill-fated British Expeditionary Force that journeyed to France. Medical records state that he was killed two days before the evacuation from Dunkirk began in 1940. Leonard was an officer in the 150th Field Ambulance unit and his war diary can be found in the Imperial War Museum.

Leonard’s father, Freeman’s great-grandfather, Richard, was born blind in 1853 and had been a piano tuner and organist at St Andrew’s Church in West Tarring. He was educated at a special school in Hampstead, which is now run by the Royal London Society for the Blind and is based in Kent. Its extensive records show that Richard lived an independent life and was trained as a musician. He became a music teacher in Kingston upon Hull.

Freeman learned more about his great-grandfather. Richard lived a comfortable but simple life and joined the English middle classes. He was married with a family and lived in a large house in West Tarring. He became an organist at St Andrew’s Church in his hometown. His first wife, Fanny, died in 1891 but he later remarried, to a woman named Emily. No death certificate exists for Fanny.

An 1894 entry in the parish magazine reads, ‘The
circumstances under which the post of organist at Tarring became vacant are well known to our readers.’

Freeman was not able to gain any information about what appears to have been a scandal, which was presumably to do with the remarriage. After the death of his second wife, Richard moved to the north of England and started a new life for himself. Living in Hull, he became a music teacher and married his third wife, Aida – Leonard’s mother and Freeman’s great-grandmother. Freeman discovered that one of Aida’s grandchildren was born blind and that the couple lost six children.

Martin learned upon a visit to Great Ormond Street Hospital and from the Royal Society of Medicine that Aida more than likely suffered from syphilis. He came to this conclusion based upon two facts: her brother died of the disease and there is a glaring similarity to the way her children died, which suggests that she more than likely caught the disease a second time from her husband, Richard. Aida, however, raised a large family and lived into her nineties, remarrying twice.

‘You kind of wonder how many extraordinary characters everyone has got in their family,’ said Freeman in the programme, ‘that we’re all made up of these extraordinary people.’

As a child, family history did not seem all that important to Freeman, as it generally doesn’t to many children, but Martin has since then become fixated by his family’s past.

‘I used to watch
Sleuth
with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier every day as a kid,’ Freeman said to the
Daily Express
’s Cheryl Stonehouse. ‘I was eleven and loved it. I thought, “I could do this acting lark”.’

This 1972 critically revered film directed by Joseph L.
Mankiewicz is about a wealthy man who loves games and the theatre and sets up a battle of wits for his wife’s lover, whom he invites to meet him at his house. It was the sort of intelligent, well-crafted and marvellously acted drama that Freeman would hope to star in one day.

Freeman was also a big fan of comedy – notably
The Goodies
, Laurel and Hardy and
Tom and Jerry
. He also enjoyed the slapstick comedy of the American star Jerry Lewis. He would watch the routines and sketches and make mental notes about timing and facial expressions and see how the actors reacted to each other. It was all subconscious preparation for his later vocation.

Martin’s family were not overtly religious, though he was raised a Roman Catholic. Martin has, since childhood, struggled with religion; though his faith in Catholicism has remained intact. Before enrolling at Brooklands College, where he studied media, Martin was a student at Salesian School, a Roman Catholic comprehensive in Chertsey.

When quizzed on the subject by a journalist for
The Scotsman
in 2009, he responded, ‘When people have a go at organised religion, it’s not necessarily people who have been reading Chomsky and come to this great idea by a lot of research. A lot of it is laziness. Organised religion, organised anything, requires commitment and requires an engagement with something. A lot of the time, we don’t want to commit. Of course, if you talk about the Spanish Inquisition, that’s the bad end of organised religion. But organised means there’s more than ten people involved, because it was an idea people liked. I don’t see how you get round it.’

From a young age, it appears that Freeman dreamed of the
Big Smoke and finding fame and fortune in the city. Life in the English suburbs could be stifling; London would be a great source of inspiration and pride for him.

Freeman discussed his earliest memories of growing up in London with the
London Evening Standard
’s Hannah Nathanson: ‘I grew up in the suburbs so I remember arriving at Waterloo and seeing Big Ben and the coloured lights on top of the Southbank Centre and thinking, “Wow!” I also remember walking along the south side of the Thames by HMS
Belfast
with my mum and it was just a wasteland. It’s amazing what’s been done to that area now.’

Martin was an asthmatic child, prone to fainting and hip pain and, as a consequence of his ailment, he had to undergo an operation on his leg. He had what is medically known as Perthes disease, which made his hip bone soften and gave him a slight limp when he walked. He did not want people to feel sorry for him and it didn’t stop him from playing for the British National Squash Squad between the ages of nine and fourteen. His love for squash, however, was overshadowed when he discovered acting.

‘There was very little drama and performance at my school,’ he admitted to
The Scotsman
in 2009, ‘so I’ve never forgotten the people who did encourage me and I’ve thought whether it would be a good idea to even get in touch with them and just say thanks, because they really opened a door for me mentally and emotionally – that’s really important.’

Freeman has since admitted he didn’t have the discipline to proceed with squash and neither did he enjoy the idea that something he did for pleasure could potentially become a job.
How ironic, given his future career.

He admitted to being something of a show-off at school; there was an extrovert inside him bubbling to jump out. His peers found him quite funny and they would say things like, ‘You should have your own TV show.’ Freeman, as with many actors, has a two-sided personality – there’s the coy, quiet persona but also the funny, more extrovert side to him that likes to show off.

There is also an artistic streak in his family: his elder brother Tim was in the 1980s Brighton-based pop group Frazier Chorus, who released two albums on Virgin Records –
Sue
in 1989 and
Ray
in 1991. A third and final album,
Wide Awake
, was released in 1995. Jamie Freeman later became a musician and website designer and their cousin Ben Norris became a stand-up comedian. However, none of them reached the heights of fame and success that Martin attained in later life. ‘I don’t think it was a surprise that I ended up as an actor, and it was anything but a disappointment,’ Martin told Miranda Sawyer of
The Guardian
in 2005. ‘My parents gave me the knowledge that reading isn’t a bad thing, and admitting to liking a painting doesn’t make you an arse-bandit. And that wouldn’t have been a problem either.’

His family, including his mother and late father, encouraged artistic freedom and expression from an early age, which no doubt influenced Martin’s decision to pursue a career as an actor.

‘I think I was influenced by the fact there was the environment at home that, we’re creating things, and expressing yourself artistically wasn’t to be frowned upon, so in that, I was always aware that it was OK to write or read,’ Freeman later explained
to
Dark Horizon
’s Paul Fischer. ‘You didn’t have to pretend to be stupid or pretend that you weren’t interested in things that you were interested in, so there was always the environment where it was open for that to happen. I guess probably seeing films at a very early age, because we all watched telly, was a strong influence.’

Freeman embraced music and film but, in terms of literature, he dipped in and out of books. Literature is often the perfect form of escapism for children who want to expand their imagination and there was one book that made an impact with some of his generation: Douglas Adams’s
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. It is a story that would have much more of an impact on Freeman’s life as an adult than it did as a child.

‘I was at an age when it either kind of hooked you in or it didn’t, and it didn’t,’ he admitted to Alona Wartofsky of
The Washington Post
. ‘That wasn’t really where I was at when I was thirteen.’

So what did he read when growing up?

‘George Orwell, I suppose…
Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia
. I liked all his stuff,’ he explained to Wartofsky. ‘I read
Animal Farm
when I was eleven, and it remained my favourite book, really.’

Aged fifteen, Freeman joined the Teddington Youth Theatre, which would be a major catalyst for his ambition to become an actor; it was at this point in his life when he found his calling, as it were.

‘It was an outlet for my showing off,’ he admitted to Andrew Duncan of
Reader’s Digest
. ‘Also, I thought I could bring down the Thatcher government with the power of my
acting. And I did. A mere five years later she went. You tell me that was coincidence. I think I hoped actors could have some influence.’

But it wasn’t just about showing off. As with any artistic endeavour, acting gave Freeman an outlet to express the emotional turmoil that was bubbling inside him. There is a pent-up energy and frustration within him. Freeman told
The Guardian
’s Miranda Sawyer in 2005: ‘I’m not a practising Catholic or I wouldn’t be living unwed with a woman, and I don’t think all poofs are going to hell, and I don’t think everyone who’s had an abortion is damned, most of my friends are atheists and I understand atheism, I get it, but I happen to be a theist. I believe in our answerableness to something else. You’re not the only cunt in the world.’

He told Rebecca Hardy of the
Mail Online
in 2009: ‘My first moral touchstone was Jesus. So how about that for an uphill struggle? Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King – anything less than that and you’re failing. It’s ridiculous, but I also know it’s true of myself.’

Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss would reiterate this point to
Entertainment Weekly
’s Josh Rottenberg in 2014: ‘He’s got such funny bones and he’s a very angry man as well, which provides a great deal of laughs. The thing we always have to do with Martin is take lines out [of the script] because he says, “Well, I can just do that with a look.” And he’s always right.’

It was not until he turned seventeen that he had enough confidence to pursue acting on a professional level. He enrolled at the famed Central School of Speech and Drama in London and immersed himself in theatre productions of
As You Like It
,
Much
Ado About Nothing
and
Romeo and Juliet
.