A plane carrying actor Morgan Freeman and his pilot blew a tire on take off from a Mississippi airport and made an emergency landing in which its landing gear collapsed and the plane ran off the side of a runway, authorities said. No one was injured.


Morgan Freeman

Mayor Bill Luckett of Clarksdale, a friend of the 78-year-old, said that the twin-engine plane made what he described as a controlled forced landing just before nightfall on Saturday at an airport in Tunica after it had taken off from another airport in his area. Freeman issued a statement saying he was heading to Texas from Mississippi aboard his plane to shoot a segment for the series, The Story of God.