Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman badly injured in Mississippi car accident

This just in from the AP:

Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman was in a hospital in Memphis, Tenn., on Monday after being injured in a car accident in Mississippi.

Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Kathy Stringer said Freeman, 71, is in serious condition. The hospital is about 90 miles north of the accident scene in rural Tallahatchie County in the Mississippi Delta.

[Clay McFerrin, editor of Sun Sentinel in Charleston,] said it appeared that Freeman’s car was airborne went it left the highway and landed in a ditch.

“They had to use the jaws of life to extract him from the vehicle,” McFerrin said. “He was lucid, conscious. He was talking, joking with some of the rescue workers at one point.”