Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman (pictured, left) has Bermuda to thank for his stellar film career ¿ well, sort of.

Freeman, the star of the recently-released "The Bucket Trip" and an Oscar winner for "Million Dollar Baby", recently told USA Today that a life-threatening sailing trip to Bermuda changed his life.

The story said: "On the night Morgan Freeman thought he might die, he figured he could go out one of two ways.

"One, he could stay below in the cabin of the sailboat he was navigating to Bermuda with his wife, radioing for help he knew would never come in a storm so strong it had pummeled the boat to its side.

"Or two, 'I could go out there and try to change things'.

"He changed things. On that ill-fated voyage 28 years ago, Freeman, then a journeyman actor still trying to crack the film business, managed to right the boat ¿ and himself. The experience influenced just about everything the 70-year-old does now."

Freeman, an avid sailor who has returned to Bermuda on his yacht several times since, became a licenced pilot at 65 ¿ good training for "The Bucket List", in which he and fellow Oscar winner Jack Nicholson play terminally ill men who decide to complete life's to-do list before dying.

So what's left for Freeman?

USA Today said he wants to produce a movie that wins the best picture Oscar, a film with "something factual to say", like "Glory", the 1989 film about black Civil War soldiers in which he starred and of which he is most proud. "I'd like to win an Oscar for a movie about something history has omitted. Namely, my people."