Sidney Poitier, the groundbreaking actor and enduring inspiration who transformed how black people were portrayed on screen, became the first black actor to win an Academy Award for best lead performance and the first to be a top box-office draw, has died. He was 94.
Poitier, winner of the best actor Oscar in 1964 for Lilies of the Field, died on Thursday in the Bahamas, according to Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the ministry of foreign affairs in the Bahamas.
Few movie stars, black or white, had such an influence both on and off the screen. Before Poitier, the son of Bahamian tomato farmers, no black actor had a sustained career as a lead performer or could get a film produced based on his own star power.
Before Poitier, few black actors were permitted a break from the stereotypes of bug-eyed servants and grinning entertainers. Before Poitier, Hollywood filmmakers rarely even attempted to tell a black person's story.
Poitier’s rise mirrored profound changes in the country in the 1950s and 1960s.
As racial attitudes evolved during the civil rights era and segregation laws were challenged and fell, Poitier was the performer to whom a cautious industry turned for stories of progress. He was the escaped black convict who befriends a racist white prisoner (Tony Curtis) in The Defiant Ones.
He was the courtly office worker who falls in love with a blind white girl in A Patch of Blue. He was the handyman in Lilies of the Field who builds a church for a group of nuns.
In one of the great roles of the stage and screen, he was the ambitious young father whose dreams clashed with those of other family members in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.
Debates about diversity in Hollywood inevitably turn to the story of Poitier. With his handsome, flawless face; intense stare and disciplined style, he was for years not just the most popular black movie star, but the only one.
“I made films when the only other black on the lot was the shoeshine boy,” he recalled in a 1988 Newsweek interview. “I was kind of the lone guy in town.”
Poitier peaked in 1967 with three of the year’s most notable movies: To Sir, With Love, in which he starred as a school teacher who wins over his unruly students at a London secondary school; In the Heat of the Night, as the determined police detective Virgil Tibbs; and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, as the prominent doctor who wishes to marry a young white woman he only recently met, her parents played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their final film together.
Theatre owners named Poitier the No. 1 star of 1967, the first time a black actor topped the list. In 2009, President Barack Obama, whose own steady bearing was sometimes compared to Poitier’s, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that the actor “not only entertained but enlightened ... revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together.”
His appeal brought him burdens not unlike such other historical figures as Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was subjected to bigotry from whites and accusations of compromise from the black community.
Poitier was held, and held himself, to standards well above his white peers. He refused to play cowards and took on characters, especially in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, of almost divine goodness.
He developed a steady, but resolved and occasionally humorous persona crystallised in his most famous line — “They call me Mr Tibbs!” — from In the Heat of the Night.
“All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value — to you I say, ‘I’m not talking about being as good as you. I hereby declare myself better than you,’” he wrote in his memoir, The Measure of a Man, published in 2000.
But even in his prime he was criticised for being out of touch. He was called an Uncle Tom and a “million-dollar shoeshine boy”.
In 1967, The New York Times published black playwright Clifford Mason’s essay, “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?” Mason dismissed Poitier's films as “a schizophrenic flight from historical fact” and the actor as a pawn for the “white man’s sense of what’s wrong with the world”.
Stardom didn't shield Poitier from racism and condescension.
He had a hard time finding housing in Los Angeles and was followed by the Ku Klux Klan when he visited Mississippi in 1964, not long after three civil rights workers had been murdered there.
In interviews, journalists often ignored his work and asked him instead about race and current events. “I am an artist, man, American, contemporary,” he snapped during a 1967 news conference. “I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due.”
Poitier was not as engaged politically as his friend and contemporary Harry Belafonte, leading to occasional conflicts between them. But he participated in the 1963 March on Washington and other civil rights events, and as an actor defended himself and risked his career.
He refused to sign loyalty oaths during the 1950s, when Hollywood was barring suspected Communists, and turned down roles he found offensive. “Almost all the job opportunities were reflective of the stereotypical perception of blacks that had infected the whole consciousness of the country,” he recalled.
“I came with an inability to do those things. It just wasn’t in me. I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.”
Poitier’s films were usually about personal triumphs rather than broad political themes, but the classic Poitier role, from In the Heat of the Night to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, was as a black man of such decency and composure — Poitier became synonymous with the word “dignified” — that he wins over the whites opposed to him.
His screen career faded in the late 1960s as political movements, black and white, became more radical and movies more explicit.
He acted less often, gave fewer interviews and began directing, his credits including the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder farce Stir Crazy, Buck and the Preacher (co-starring Poitier and Belafonte) and the Bill Cosby comedies Uptown Saturday Night and Let’s Do It Again.
