Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida, arriving nearly three months premature while his Bahamian parents, Reginald and Evelyn Poitier, were visiting the city to sell tomatoes from their farm. His unexpected American birth gave him United States citizenship, though the family soon returned home to Cat Island in the Bahamas, where he spent his childhood without electricity, running water, or paved roads ^[1]. He was the youngest of the couple's surviving children.

When the tomato trade collapsed, the family moved to Nassau, and there the young Poitier saw his first motion picture. His formal schooling was brief, amounting to only a few years, a gap he later worked hard to close on his own. At fifteen he was sent to Miami to live with an older brother, and the segregated American South delivered a jolt he never forgot. Growing up on Cat Island, he had never been taught to think of himself as inferior, and he refused to accept the racial code he encountered in Florida ^[2].

At sixteen he moved to New York City with little money, washing dishes to survive and sleeping at times in a bus terminal. During the Second World War he enlisted in the United States Army by lying about his age, serving briefly in a medical detachment before securing a discharge and returning to New York ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Sidney Poitier before the fame finds a determined teenager auditioning at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem. His first tryout failed: his West Indian accent was thick, and his reading halting. Stung, he spent months improving his English by listening to radio broadcasts and having a dishwashing colleague help him read newspapers, then returned and won a place, taking janitorial work at the theater in exchange for acting lessons ^[2].

Stage roles led to Broadway, including the 1946 production of Lysistrata, and then to film. His screen debut in a leading studio picture came with No Way Out (1950), in which he played a Black doctor confronting a racist patient. The role established the pattern of his early career: dignified, intelligent characters who met bigotry with composure ^[3]. He followed it with Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), filmed in South Africa, and Blackboard Jungle (1955), a hit that widened his audience.

The Defiant Ones (1958), in which he played a convict chained to a white fellow escapee portrayed by Tony Curtis, brought Poitier an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, the first ever received by a Black man in that category ^[1]. The next year he starred on Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, creating the role of Walter Lee Younger, and he reprised the part in the 1961 film ^[4].

The defining moment among Sidney Poitier achievements came on April 13, 1964, when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), playing Homer Smith, an itinerant handyman who builds a chapel for a group of German nuns in Arizona. No Black performer had ever won a lead acting Oscar; Hattie McDaniel's 1940 award had been in the supporting category. Another Black man did not win Best Actor until Denzel Washington in 2002 ^[5].

1967 was the summit of his box office power. Three of his films appeared that single year: To Sir, with Love, in which he played a teacher in London's East End; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Hollywood's first major studio treatment of an interracial engagement, opposite Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; and In the Heat of the Night, where his Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs investigates a murder in a hostile Mississippi town. The last of these won the Best Picture Oscar, and the moment when Tibbs slaps a white plantation owner who has slapped him became one of the most discussed scenes of the decade ^[3]. Exhibitors ranked Poitier the top box office draw in America that year, a first for a Black actor ^[1].

He moved behind the camera in the 1970s, directing Buck and the Preacher (1972), the comedy hits Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let's Do It Again (1975) with Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby, and later Stir Crazy (1980) with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, which became one of the highest grossing films by a Black director up to that time ^[6]. He was also a founding partner, alongside Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, and Steve McQueen, of First Artists, a production company formed in 1969 to give stars control over their own projects ^[3].

Poitier married dancer Juanita Hardy in 1950, and the couple had four daughters before divorcing in 1965. During the late 1950s and 1960s he had a long relationship with actress Diahann Carroll, his co-star in Porgy and Bess and Paris Blues, an involvement both later wrote about candidly. In 1976 he married Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus, whom he had met on the set of The Lost Man (1969); they had two daughters and remained together until his death ^[1].

Off screen he was active in the civil rights movement. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington, helped raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in 1964, with his close friend Harry Belafonte, carried funds to civil rights workers in Greenwood, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer campaign, a trip made under threat from the Ku Klux Klan ^[7].

He wrote three volumes of autobiography: This Life (1980), The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000), which was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club, and Life Beyond Measure (2008), framed as letters to his great granddaughter ^[2].

Acting offers of the quality he demanded thinned in the late 1970s, and after Buck and the Preacher era directing successes he stepped away from screen performing for over a decade. He returned in 1988 with Shoot to Kill and Little Nikita, and later played Thurgood Marshall in the television film Separate but Equal (1991) and Nelson Mandela in Mandela and de Klerk (1997), earning Emmy nominations for both portrayals ^[3].

Diplomacy occupied much of his final working decades. From 1997 to 2007 he served as the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan, and he concurrently represented the Bahamas to UNESCO. In 1974 he had been made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, entitling him to the style Sir Sidney Poitier, though as a dual citizen he rarely used the title in the United States ^[1].

Honors accumulated steadily: an honorary Academy Award in 2002 for his career and dignity on screen, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1999, and in 2009 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by President Barack Obama, who called him a symbol of dignity and grace ^[5]. Poitier died at his home in Los Angeles on January 6, 2022, at the age of 94 ^[8].

Any honest Sidney Poitier biography must reckon with how alone he was at the top. For most of the 1950s and 1960s he was effectively the only Black actor American studios would cast in leading roles, and that solitary position drew criticism as well as praise. Some Black commentators in the late 1960s argued his characters were too restrained, too accommodating to white comfort. Poitier answered that he had chosen every role to advance the image of Black men on screen, and that the range of parts offered to him was never wide ^[2].

The generation that followed acknowledged the debt openly. Denzel Washington, accepting his own Best Actor Oscar in 2002 on the same night Poitier received his honorary award, told him from the stage that he would always be chasing him. Halle Berry, Morgan Freeman, and Oprah Winfrey have all cited him as the figure who made their careers imaginable ^[5]. In 2021 Arizona State University named its film school the Sidney Poitier New American Film School ^[6].

Among the most cited Sidney Poitier facts are the firsts: first Black Best Actor nominee, first Black Best Actor winner, first Black performer to top the annual box office rankings. Yet his lasting contribution was less statistical than moral. By insisting on roles of intelligence and self respect at a time when Hollywood offered Black actors mostly servants and comic relief, he changed the assumptions of an entire industry, and American movies never went back ^[3].