Sidney Poitier

In 1967 Sidney Poitier had three of the year's biggest films at once. In To Sir, with Love he was a teacher in an East London classroom; in In the Heat of the Night, a Philadelphia detective forced to solve a murder in Mississippi; in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a doctor whose engagement exposed the liberal limits of two white parents. No Black film actor had ever held that much commercial power. The achievement also made him the screen on which the country projected every argument about respectability, anger and change.

Cat Island to Harlem

Poitier was born unexpectedly in Miami on 20 February 1927 while his Bahamian parents were there selling tomatoes. He was small enough that his father expected him to die, but he survived and grew up on Cat Island without electricity, paved roads or a daily encounter with the racial categories of the United States. The family moved to Nassau when he was ten. At fifteen he was sent to live with an older brother in Miami, and the violence of segregation pushed him north to New York within a year.

He washed dishes, slept where he could and lied about his age to enter the Army during the Second World War. His first audition for the American Negro Theatre was a disaster: he read haltingly and his accent was too strong. He traded janitorial work for acting classes and listened to American radio until he could reshape his speech.[2] When Harry Belafonte, whom he was understudying, missed a performance, Poitier went on and found the career he had nearly been told to abandon.

The first roles

His film debut was No Way Out (1950), as a doctor treating a white racist played by Richard Widmark.[3] Cry, the Beloved Country, Blackboard Jungle and Edge of the City followed. The Defiant Ones (1958), in which Poitier and Tony Curtis play escaped prisoners chained together, brought him the first competitive Best Actor nomination for a Bla[3]ck man.

On Broadway he created Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway.[2] Poitier pushed the production toward the actor and director Lloyd Richards, then carried the role into the 1961 film. Walter's thwarted hunger and explosive movement gave Poitier a part less composed than the upright professionals Hollywood usually offered him.

Paris Blues

Poitier filmed Paris Blues on location in Paris in 1960.[4] He plays Eddie Cook, a jazz saxophonist who has found in France room to work and live without American segregation; Paul Newman plays his white bandmate, Duke Ellington wrote the score, and Louis Armstrong appears as a visiting trum[4]peter. The film turns the postwar Black expatriate argument into a romance: Eddie must decide whether freedom abroad is enough when the civil-rights struggle is happening at home.

The Paris setting was not incidental decoration. Black American musicians and writers had been making the comparison for decades, and Poitier's character states it directly through the life he can have in the city. That makes Paris Blues the film in which his acting, jazz, the city and the politics of expatriation meet in a single work.

The Oscar and the burden of 1967

On 13 April 1964 Poitier won Best Actor for Lilies of the Field, playing a traveling handyman who helps a group of German nuns build a desert chapel. He was the first Black man to win the category. The speech was short; its opening acknowledged the distance traveled to reach the stage.

The films of 1967 made him Hollywood's leading box-office star, but the year also sharpened criticism that his impeccably controlled characters existed to reassure white audiences. Poitier understood the trap: refuse the roles and there might be no Black leading man on screen; accept them and one man's dignity could be mistaken for a complete politics. His best performances make the control itself dramatic. Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night is not calm because the world is calm; he is measuring what every gesture will cost.

Director, activist and diplomat

Poitier helped finance civil-rights work, attended the 1963 March on Washington and joined Harry Belafonte on a dangerous 1964 trip to deliver money to Freedom Summer organizers in Mississippi. In the 1970s he moved behind the camera. Buck and the Preacher, Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again put Black friendship, western adventure and comedy at the center rather than at the edge of the frame. Stir Crazy (1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, became his largest directing success.

He later served as the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan and to UNESCO. The Academy gave him an honorary award in 2002 for his artistic and human achievements. He died in Los Angeles on 6 January 2022, aged ninety-four.

Sidney Poitier and James Baldwin

James Baldwin watched Poitier's career as both an achievement and a test of what Hollywood would permit a Black star to be. In The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's book-length essay on American movies, he returns to Poitier's roles to ask why dignity had to arrive so polished and why white audiences demanded gratitude from the men who exposed their fear.

The critique was not a dismissal of the actor. Baldwin understood the narrow corridor Poitier had crossed and the costs of being made exceptional. Reading the two together is useful because Poitier's performances and Baldwin's criticism describe the same constraint from opposite sides of the screen.