Poitier, Sidney

Source:

 African American National Biography

Poitier, Sidney

(20 Feb. 1927– ),

actor, director, and producer, was born in Miami, Florida, the youngest of the seven children of Reginald Poitier, a tomato farmer, and Evelyn Outten. The family lived on Cat Island in the Bahamas, but when the tomato business no longer proved lucrative, they moved to Nassau, where Poitier attended Western Senior High School and Governor's High School. But even in the more prosperous urban center of Nassau, the Poitier family remained impoverished, and he was forced to leave school during the Depression in order to help his father.

Despite their financial difficulties, Reginald instilled a sense of pride in his family, and Poitier learned never

Sidney Poitier with his Oscar statuette at the 36th Annual Academy Awards in Santa Monica, 13 April 1964. (AP Images.)

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to indulge in self-pity but rather to make the best out of every situation. With the urban landscape arrived the difficulties of adolescence and the influence of wayward youth, and when Poitier fell into some trouble his parents sent him to Miami to live with relatives. Working as a delivery boy, Poitier encountered racism in the form of police hostility and the Ku Klux Klan. Such experiences were jarring for a young teenager accustomed to the all-black environment of his native Bahamas, and, stifled by the oppressive racism, Poitier headed for New York. He quickly found a job as a dishwasher and struggled to make ends meet. In 1944, lying about his age, he joined the army, and after serving two years in a medical unit during World War II, he returned to Harlem in 1945.

While scouring local newspapers in search of a job, Poitier stumbled upon an advertisement for “actors wanted” and decided to audition at the American Negro Theater (ANT). His first audition ended rather dismally, when he was interrupted and told to stop wasting the director's time. That director, Frederick Douglass O'Neal, was not impressed with Poitier's halting, accented English as he struggled through the dialogue. Poitier was undaunted and left the theater even more determined to act. During the next six months he listened to the radio and improved his English, and by imitating the voices he heard, he managed to strip himself of his Bahamian accent. In addition, he devoured any available written text, knowing that reading extensively would help him accomplish his goal. Initially driven simply by a desire to show O'Neal that he could indeed act, Poitier soon began to take the theater seriously. His efforts paid off, and at his next audition O'Neal agreed to give him acting lessons in exchange for janitorial work.

Cast as Harry Belafonte's understudy in Days of Our Youth, Poitier got his first break when Belafonte was unable to perform the night the Broadway director James Light came to see the play. Light was impressed by Poitier and offered him a role in his 1946 production of Lysistrata. Unfortunately, what should have been a promising debut performance was tarnished by an attack of nervousness that caused Poitier to flub most of his lines. But the critics were gentle, noting particularly Poitier's gift for comedy. Following this production, Poitier appeared at the ANT in On Strivers Row (1946) and then as Lester in Anna Lucasta. In 1950 he was cast in the leading role as a doctor struggling to do his job well during the tense racial climate after World War II in Joseph Mankiewicz's drama No Way Out. Also in 1950 Poitier married the dancer Juanita Hardy, with whom he would have four children before the couple's divorce in 1965.

The success of No Way Out led to roles in Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), Red Ball Express (1952), Go, Man, Go! (1954), and The Blackboard Jungle (1955). With these films under his belt, Poitier gained access to more of what Hollywood had to offer, and he worked consistently during the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Edge of the City (1957), Something of Value (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), and Porgy and Bess (1959). In each case he portrayed polite, well-spoken African Americans, defying the stereotype of the singing, dancing, and joking black man that had prevailed in American film. With his performance in The Defiant Ones he became the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor.

With his reputation established as a Hollywood star, Poitier returned to the stage in 1959, originating the role of Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, produced by Lloyd Richards. Poitier won a Best Actor Tony for this role before returning to film in All the Young Men (1960) and again as Younger in the film version of A Raisin in the Sun (1961). These two roles led up to his part in Lilies of the Field (1963), the story of a construction worker who comes to the aid of a group of German-speaking nuns. With this performance Poitier became the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964. Thereafter Poitier was even more sought after as an actor, and in 1967 alone he appeared in three films for which he earned enormous success: he starred in To Sir with Love and then played Virgil Tibbs, a northern police detective struggling with a racist sheriff in a southern town in In the Heat of the Night. He then played a successful young doctor who is engaged to a young white woman in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, which was nominated for ten Academy awards.

With each role, Poitier was highly conscious of representing his family and his race, and he accepted only those roles that he believed portrayed African Americans in a positive light. For all of his efforts, he still received criticism from other black actors who believed Poitier was doing a disservice to his race by embodying the “good Negro” stereotype—the noble and magnanimous black man who never steps out of the mainstream perception of what a “proper” black man ought to be and do.

In 1970 Poitier reprised his role as Virgil Tibbs in They Call Me Mister Tibbs, and in 1972 he appeared as Buck, opposite Harry Belafonte, in Buck and the Preacher, a role that marked a departure from the generally distinguished characters he had previously portrayed. The latter was also his directorial debut. Two years later he collaborated with Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night (1974). In 1974 Poitier married the actress Joanna Shimkus; they had two children. He also worked with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand, among others, to form First Artists, an independent production company. He subsequently filmed two sequels to Uptown Saturday Night, titled Let's Do It Again (1975) and A Piece of the Action (1977).

In 1980 Poitier published an autobiography, This Life, and gave up acting in favor of directing such movies as Stir Crazy (1980), Hanky Panky (1982), and Fast Forward (1985). He collaborated with Bill Cosby once again in 1990 and directed Ghost Dad. Poitier returned to acting with Shoot to Kill (1988), Little Nikita (1988), Sneakers (1992), and television films such as Separate but Equal (1991), Children of the Dust (1995), To Sir with Love II (1996), Mandela and de Klerk (1997), and The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn (1999).

In 1997 Poitier served briefly as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. He published a second autobiography, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, in 2000. He has received numerous honors, including two Emmy awards, five NAACP Image awards, Lifetime Achievement awards from the American Film Institute and the Screen Actors Guild, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth of England. In 2002 Poitier was awarded an Honorary Academy Award. That same night Halle Berry became the first black woman to win a Best Actress Oscar and Denzel Washington became the first African American actor to win a Best Actor Oscar since Poitier broke that color line in 1964. In 2009 President Barack Obama awarded Poitier the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s two highest civilian awards. Poitier received another major honor in 2011 when he was the recipient of a Gala Tribute by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Previous winners included John Ford, Billy Wilder, and Jane Fonda. Poitier was the first person of color to be honored by this award.

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