Poitier, Sidney

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Sidney Poitier

Personal

Born February 20, 1927, in Miami, FL; son of Reginald James (a tomato farmer) and Evelyn (a tomato farmer; maiden name, Outten) Poitier; married Juanita Hardy (a dancer), April 29, 1950 (divorced, 1965); married Joanna Shimkus (an actress), January 23, 1976; children: (first marriage) Beverly Poitier Mould, Pamela, Sherri, Gina; (second marriage) Anika, Sydney (daughters). Education: Attended school in Nassau, British West Indies (now Commonwealth of the Bahamas). Hobbies and other interests: Reading, music, golf, football, tennis, gardening, travel.

Addresses

Office—c/o Verdon Productions, 9350 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 310, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Agent—Martin Baum, 1888 Century Pk. W., No. 1400, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

Career

Actor, director, and author. American Negro Theatre, New York, NY, dishwasher and janitor, c. early 1940s; First Artists Productions (film production company), Hollywood, CA, cofounder, 1969—. Actor in stage productions, including Days of Our Youth; (Broadway debut) Lysistrata, 1946; Anna Lucasta (touring production), 1948; A Raisin in the Sun, 1959; Striver's Row; You Can't Take It with You; Rain; Freight; The Fisherman; Hidden Horizon; Sepia Cinderella; and Riders to the Sea. Actor in television productions, including "Parole Chief," Philco Television Playhouse, 1952; "A Man Is Ten Feet Tall," Philco Television Playhouse, 1955; "Fascinating Stranger," Kraft Television Theatre, 1955; The New Bill Cosby Show, 1972; Separate but Equal (movie), 1988; Children of the Dust (movie), 1995; To Sir with Love II (movie), 1996; Mandela and de Klerk (movie), 1997; David and Lisa (movie), 1998; Free of Eden (movie), 1999; The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn (movie), 1999; and The Last Brickmaker in America (movie), 2001. Actor in films, including as Signal Corps Doctor, From Whom Cometh My Help, 1949; Dr. Luther Brooks, No Way Out, 1950; Reverend Msimangu, Cry, the Beloved Country, 1952; Corporal Andrew Robertson, Red Ball Express, 1952; Inman Jackson, Go, Man, Go!, 1954; Gregory Miller, The Blackboard Jungle, 1955; Gates, Goodbye, My Lady, 1956; Tommy Tyler, Edge of the City, 1957; Kimani, Something of Value, 1957; Rau-ru, Band of Angels, 1958; Noah Cullen, The Defiant Ones, 1958; Obam, The Mark of the Hawk, 1958; Porgy, Porgy and Bess, 1959; Marcus, The Virgin Island, 1960; Towler, All the Young Men, 1960; Walter Lee Younger, A Raisin in the Sun, 1961; Eddie Cook, Paris Blues, 1961; Doctor, Pressure Point, 1962; Homer Smith, Lilies of the Field, 1963; Ali Mansuh, The Long Ships, 1964; Ben Munceford, The Bedford Incident, 1965; Simon of Cyrene, The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965; Gordon Ralfe, A Patch of Blue, 1965; Alan Newell,The Slender Thread, 1965; Toller, Duel at Diablo, 1966; John Prentice, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 1967; Virgil Tibbs, In the Heat of the Night, 1967; Mark Thackeray, To Sir, with Love, 1967; Jack Parks, For Love of Ivy, 1968; Jason Higgs, The Lost Man, 1969; King: A Filmed Record . . . from Montgomery to Memphis, 1970; Virgil Tibbs, They Call Me Mister Tibbs, 1970; John Kane, Brother John, 1971; Virgil Tibbs, The Organization, 1971; Buck, Buck and the Preacher, 1972; Matt Younger, A Warm December, 1973; Steve Jackson, Uptown Saturday Night, 1974; Shack Twala, The Wilby Conspiracy, 1975; Clyde Williams, Let's Do It Again, 1976; Manny Durrell, A Piece of the Action, 1977; Warren Stantin, Shoot to Kill (also known as Deadly Pursuit), 1988; Roy Parmenter, Little Nikita, 1988; Donald Crease, Sneakers, 1992; and Carter Preston, The Jackal, 1997. Director of play Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, 1968, and of films, including Buck and the Preacher, 1972; A Warm December, 1973; Uptown Saturday Night, 1974; Let's Do It Again, 1976; A Piece of the Action, 1977; Stir Crazy, 1980; Traces, 1981; Hanky Panky, 1982; Fast Forward, 1985; and Ghost Dad. Member, board of trustees, American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989; member of board of directors, Walt Disney Co., 1994. Appointed Bahamanian Ambassador to Japan, 1997. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942-45; served as physiotherapist.

Member

American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, American Film Institute, Directors Guild of America, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (life member), Writers Guild of America, Actors Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

Awards, Honors

Academy Award nomination for best actor, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Silver Berlin Bear Award for best actor, Berlin International Film Festival, and Golden Globe nomination for actor in a leading role, all 1958, all for The Defiant Ones; Georgio Cini award, Venice Film Festival, 1958, for Something of Value; Golden Globe nomination for actor in a musical, 1959, for Porgy and Bess; Golden Globe Award nomination for best actor in a leading role, 1961, for A Raisin in the Sun, 1965, for A Patch of Blue, 1967, for In the Heat of the Night, and 1991, for Separate but Equal; Academy Award for best actor, and Golden Globe Award for actor in a leading role, both 1963; both for Lilies of the Field; San Sebastian Prize for best actor, San Sebastian International Film Festival, 1968, for For the Love of Ivy; Golden Globe Henrietta Award, 1968; named Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1974; Cecil B. De Mille Award, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, 1981; Life Achievement Award, American Film Institute, 1992; Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award, 1995; Lifetime Achievement Award, Screen Actor's Guild, 1999; Grammy Award for best spoken-word album, 2001, for The Measure of a Man; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Hall of Fame award, 2001; honorary award, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2002; Trumpet Awards Living Legend honor, 2002.

Writings

(Author of original story) For the Love of Ivy, Palomar Pictures International, 1968.

This Life (autobiography), Knopf (New York, NY), 1980.

The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, HarperCollins (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

Adaptations

The Measure of a Man was recorded on audiocassette, with narration by Poitier, 2001.

Sidelights

American actor and sometime director Sidney Poitier is hailed as the first black actor to appear in major dramatic roles in mainstream Hollywood films, and earned the first best-actor Academy Award ever awarded to a person of color. "Celebrated as the first black actor to break through the stereotyping and racism of Hollywood," according to Patricia Bosworth in the Washington Post Book World, Poitier "has individualized and humanized the black experience with powerful performances." Preferring to depict dignified, educated, professional characters on film, Poitier's early life stands in stark contrast to his cinematic portraits. His professionalism and uncompromising approach to his career have served as a symbol to generations of blacks, both in and out of the film industry. In a 1992 tribute to the actor, colleague Denzel Washington referred to Poitier as "a source of pride for many African Americans."

Bahamian Childhood

The son of Bahamian tomato farmer Reginald Poitier and his wife, Evelyn, Sidney Poitier was born in Miami, Florida, in February of 1927. From the very beginning he showed determination; born prematurely while his parents were traveling into Miami to market the family's tomato crop, Poitier weighed only three pounds. The sight of the helpless newborn moved his father to search for a shoebox in which to bury him. Amazingly, the infant survived, and was brought back to the family home in the Bahamas after the tomato crop was sold.

One of eight children, Poitier spent his early childhood fishing, swimming, and catching turtles near the family's home in the small village of Cat Island, and attended island schools for four years. When the Florida legislature, acting on the wishes of local farmers, put an embargo on Bahamian tomatoes, Poitier's parents saw their livelihood disappear overnight. Forced to sell their home, they moved to Nassau, and everyone in the family was required to work. Reginald Poitier sold cigars in bars, while Evelyn got a job crushing rocks for a gravel manufacturer. Despite their poverty, the family maintained their pride and dignity and, through the example of Reginald Poitier, never indulged in self-pity. Noting that his father "had a wonderful sense of himself," Poitier would later explain to American Film interviewer Frank Spotnitz: "Every time I took a part, from the first part, from the first day, I always said to myself, 'This must reflect well on his name.'"

Life in the large city of Nassau gave young Poitier exposure to the magic of movies for the first time, and he was immediately captivated by the silver screen, particularly Westerns. Far less exciting to Poitier was the time he spent in school, and he left as soon as he was legally able. At age sixteen he moved to his older brother 's home in Miami, Florida, where he experienced racial prejudice for the first time in his life. After a three-year stint as a physiotherapist in the U.S. Army when he came of age, Poitier moved to New York City, where he subsisted on restaurant jobs until he spotted a newspaper advertisement looking for actors. Knowing nothing about acting, except that it would be a change from dishwashing, he decided to audition for the American Negro Theatre. His strong West Indian accent and his limited reading ability lost him the audition, but he overcame both obstacles, learning by mimicking radio broadcasters and reading the newspaper with the help of an elderly Jewish waiter who worked in the same restaurant. Although his second audition with the same troupe was also unsuccessful, he stayed on as a janitor in exchange for acting lessons.

Discriminating in Choice of Roles

With continued practice, Poitier eventually perfected his speaking voice, and was chosen as Harry Belafonte's understudy in a production of Days of Our Youth. When this performance was noted, he was cast in several American Negro Theatre productions, among them Lysistrata, Anna Lucasta, and A Raisin in the Sun. His first taste of critical acclaim came in response to his somewhat uneven performance in Lysistrata: despite the fact that he was so nervous that he mixed up his lines and fled off the stage in a panic, critics fortunate enough to attend the fledgling actor's inauspicious Broadway debut commented positively on Poitier's acting potential.

A role in the Signal Corps documentary From Whom Cometh My Help in 1949 brought Poitier to the attention of Hollywood, and he landed his first major screen role in Joseph Mankiewicz's 1950 "message movie" No Way Out. A token black doctor in an otherwise all-white hospital, Poitier's character can be viewed as a prototype of the sterotype-breaking roles he would perform throughout the coming decade: a black man who could do—better—anything a white man could. Poitier's Dr. Brooks—a dedicated physician who is accused of murdering one of his white patients by the patient's racist brother—maintains a "calm dignity," wrote New York Times critic Thomas M. Pryor. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted in the New York Times, Poitier gained a reputation for refusing "scripts that failed to satisfy his image of black Americans."

In his next few films Poitier expanded his acting repertoire to include a priest, a truck driver, and a basketball player. His 1955 success in the Richard Brooks-directed Blackboard Jungle followed up a critically acclaimed performance in Cry, the Beloved Country to firmly establish him as a dramatic actor. In Blackboard Jungle he portrays an unruly young man in an undisciplined, dangerous city school who eventually sides with authority during a violent standoff between a gang leader and a teacher.

His 1958 film, The Defiant Ones, earned Poitier an Academy Award nomination for his role as an escaped convict who is chained at the wrist to a racist white convict (played by Tony Curtis). In this film by director Stanley Kramer, the two convicts hate each other at first, but during the course of the film their shared hardships as fugitives from a brutal prison camp in a Southern backwater forge an intangible link of humanity that binds them together as strongly as the chain. Poitier's performance was characterized as "intensely dynamic" by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, the critic adding that the actor projects "a deep and powerful strain of underlying compassion."

Moving back to the New York stage the following year, Poitier won acclaim for his performance on Broadway in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. The drama of a poor black family trying to improve their lives, the play and the subsequent film version starred Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, the ambitious young husband who wants to open a business with insurance benefits from his father's death. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson deemed Poitier "a remarkable actor with enormous power that is always under control," and he commended the thirty-two-year-old actor's versatility. Poitier is "as eloquent when he has nothing to say as when he has a pungent line to speak," Atkinson remarked, adding that "he can convey devious processes of thought as graphically as he can clown and dance."

Honored with Academy Award

Poitier's reprise of his stage role in the film version of A Raisin in the Sun marked the start of a new era in films, as the change in attitudes due to the civil rights era began to emerge in American popular culture. As partial acknowledgment of that change, in 1963 Poitier was honored as the first black to win the Academy Award for best actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. As Homer Smith, an unemployed
construction worker traveling through southwestern Arizona who is challenged by a group of nuns into building a chapel, Poitier brings to his character a need to prove not only himself but also the potential of his race. Said Poitier after accepting a rousing ovation by Academy Awards presentation audiences upon receiving his award, "It has been a long journey to this moment." For Poitier his journey had extended further than Hollywood; he traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, and Memphis, Tennessee, to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"They Call Me Mister Tibbs"

By the mid-1960s Poitier had become a bankable Hollywood commodity, and in 1967 he gave three of the most outstanding performances of his career. In To Sir, with Love, which was popular with teen audiences due to its theme song sung by film co-star Lulu, he portrays Mr. Thackeray, a charismatic high-school teacher who tames a belligerent class; in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night he stars as a sophisticated, city-trained police detective solving a mysterious murder in a rural, racist community; and in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, playing opposite Hollywood greats Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, he takes on the role of an eminent scientist who has fallen in love with and plans to marry a white woman. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner echos the interracial theme of A Patch of Blue, in which Poitier had starred two years before. Although after 1957 a black person was allowed to embrace a white person on screen, interracial marriages were still illegal in many states when these films reached theatres; while American audiences might have thought themselves open-minded about close relationships between the races—especially a black man with a white woman—these films forced many to visibly confront hidden prejudices. For its part in advancing race relations, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was the first film about an interracial relationship that did not end in tragedy.

Poitier's role opposite Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night is especially significant among Poitier's fans. In one scene, the small-town redneck sheriff played by Steiger asks Detective Virgil Tibbs "What do they call you, boy?," and Poitier's black detective responds, confrontatively, "They call me Mister Tibbs." This line resonated among black viewers in particular, as a demand for respect based on their accomplishments. The film was equally powerful; it spawned two film sequels starring Poitier—1970's They Call Me Mister Tibbs! and the following year's The Organization—as well as a popular 1980s television program that featured Howard Rollins as Virgil Tibbs.

Remarking on the groundbreaking path of his career during the 1960s, Poitier has remained modest, preferring to view himself as a black actor who simply was in the right place at the right time. Calling that tumultuous decade "one of the periods in American history with certain attitudes toward minorities that stayed in vogue," he told Peter Ellicott in the London Times: "I didn't understand the elements swirling around. I was a young actor with some talent, an enormous curiosity, a certain kind of appeal. You wrap all that together and you have a potent mix."

Crossover Actor a Victim of Changing Times

Poitier's dignified image often won him comparison to suave actor Cary Grant, bolstering his popularity with white as well as black audiences. In fact, in 1967 he ranked in the top ten in a tally of the most highly paid stars in Hollywood, and the next year he moved up to the top of the list. His status as a "crossover" star, while fueling his career during the 1960s, would prove detrimental a decade later, as the new "blaxploitation" film became popular. Promoting a black-power image at odds with Poitier's gentlemanly one, such films attracted a younger, more radicalized audience. Writers soon began to criticize Poitier's "bleached-out roles," recounted Patricia Bosworth, citing a particularly scathing review that was published in the hallowed New York Times. The actor "took an inordinate amount of flack from both black and liberal white critics," agreed Thomas Cripps in American Film, because "his high visibility made him an easy target for critics in search of a heavy on whom to lay blame for the long history of Hollywood's contempt for blacks." Some detractors held that Poitier was merely "a pretty black face that Hollywood could exploit without having to acknowledge black culture," Christopher Lehmann-Haupt explained. Poitier recognized that "the few black faces passing across the silver screen were not anywhere near enough to assuage the frustrations our people felt," but "however inadequate my steps appeared, it was important that we make it." For his own part, Poitier "maneuvered himself into a position to make the films he wanted to whether Hollywood likes it or not," observed Lehmann-Haupt.

Don's Director's Hat

In 1969, still riding the crest of a successful decade, Poitier had joined with actors Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand to form First Artists Productions, hoping that through this company he could eventually move into other aspects of filmmaking. Now, three years later, on the set of Buck and the Preacher, opportunity knocked and he was ready to answer. The film, a revisionist take on the traditional Western genre—the heroes are black and the bad guys are white—had begun filming under Joseph Sargent's direction, but when creative differences prompted Sargent to leave the Columbia Pictures production, Poitier offered to finish the film. He produced some sample footage that he had directed, and impressed the studio's powers-that-be so much that he was hired to complete the picture. While Vincent Canby noted in the New York Times that Poitier's acting was unspectacular, he was quick to add that "with what I suspect is the complete cooperation of Poitier, the film is stolen almost immediately by Harry Belafonte." Rolling Stone contributor Joseph McBridge praised the film for its "creative use of the conventions it turns inside out" and noted that "it mocks [the conventions] at the same time it allows black audiences . . . the pleasure of usurping the mythology which the Western has long used to keep minorities in their place."

Poitier went on to direct several other films during the 1970s, building his skills behind the camera with A Warm December (1973), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let's Do It Again (1975), and A Piece of the Action (1977). Uptown Saturday Night boasts an acting lineup that includes Poitier, Belafonte, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, and Richard Pryor. Dubbed an "exuberant black joke" by Canby, the film satirizes the gangster film of the 1930s, its humor fueled by over-the-top expressions of fear and sham courage. According to Penelope Gilliatt, who reviewed the film for the New Yorker, "any white who had made [such a film as this] would have been run out of town for prolonging Uncle Tom stereotypes." Canby enjoyed the film, noting that it "has the effect of liberating all of us from our hangups"; Uptown Saturday Night, he added, is "so full of good humor and . . . high spirits that it reduces movie criticism to the status of a most nonessential craft."

The 1980s was Poitier's decade to direct rather than act in films. He started off with a bang, producing the off-beat comedy hit Stir Crazy, starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Although several critics found the comedy low-brow—Canby dismissed it as "improvised, badly" in his New York Times review, while a Newsweek reviewer blamed scriptwriter Bruce Jay Friedman—the film proved to be one of the biggest box-office hits to date. Poitier, as director, survived the reviews unscathed, with the Newsweek critic noting that he "serves his leading men well."

While Poitier was busy with a spate of directing projects that included Hanky-Panky (1982), Fast Forward (1985), and the 1988 action-adventure films Shoot to Kill and Little Nikita, he also turned his hand to writing. He chronicled his long and varied career in the 1980 autobiography This Life. According to Poitier, the book was written in the hope of leaving "a truer accounting" of himself to the public and his children. As he told People interviewer Lois Armstrong, "My years had been so full I wanted to itemize them while I was still lucid."

Like his other creative endeavors, Poitier's efforts at writing were met enthusiastically by many reviewers. New Republic critic James Wolcott remarked that, "Sassed-up with obscenity and street slang, This Life has the smack, humor, and vigor of an all-night rap session," while in the Washington Post Book World Patricia Bosworth applauded it as a "large-spirited, informative autobiography, one of the best additions to the small library of books on the black artist in films." Thomas Cripps praised the memoir in his American Film review for its "smooth writing, honest detail, and clear story line," while Mel Watkins summed up This Life in the New York Times Book Review, writing: "Without pretentiousness and with considerable charm it relates the story of one man's gritty struggle to reach the top in his profession and thereby open doors that had previously been denied his race."

After devoting himself primarily to directing for a decade, Poitier ultimately called it quits after 1990's Ghost Dad, a Bill Cosby vehicle that floundered at the box office. Moving once again in front of the camera lens, he took on several substantial roles, primarily for the growing cable television market. In the 1991 television film Separate but Equal, he gave an acclaimed performance as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first African American to sit on the high court. The 1992 film Sneakers found him co-starring with Robert Redford, River Phoenix, and Dan Ackroyd, in a comedy/spy film about a group of security experts who think they are working for the government until they realize that they have become ensnared in a masterful plot to penetrate security systems around the world. Returning to television, in 1995 he starred as Oklahoma bounty hunter Gypsy Smith in the historical drama Children of the Dust, and two years later starred in the made-for-television film Mandela and DeKlerk, in which he played Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid activist who was finally released from prison in 1990. The 1997 hit The Jackal featured Poitier alongside actors Richard Gere and Bruce Willis in the role of an FBI deputy director who is forced to hire one deadly assassin to rid the world of another.

Reaps Well-deserved Honors

In 1992 the American Film Institute honored Poitier with an award for lifetime achievement, a fitting tribute to an actor who, over the course of over four decades and almost forty films, had, like the many characters he played, proved that, from the perspective of race, a black American could indeed accomplish as much—and often much more—than any white. Accepting the award Poitier was characteristically humble but not self-deprecating when he said: "I enter my golden years with nothing profound to say and no advice to leave, but I thank you for paying me this great honor while I still have hair, and my stomach still has not obscured my view of my shoe tops." Similar awards quickly followed, including the National Board of Review Career Achievement Award in 1994, the Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, and a special Academy Award in 2002. At each of these events he was lauded with respect by those he has mentored and with whom he has worked: James Earl Jones, Denzel Washington, Michael Moriarty, and Carroll O'Connor among them. Noted civil rights activist Rosa Parks also appeared to honor Poitier, calling him "a great actor and role model" during her appearance at the American Film Institute honors.

If you enjoy the works of Sidney Poitier

If you enjoy the works of Sidney Poitier, you may also want to check out the following:

To Kill a Mockingbird, an Academy Award-winning film, 1961.

Dead Poets Society, a film starring Robin Williams, 1989.

Driving Miss Daisy, a film starring Morgan Freeman, 1989.

While his career remained solid, Poitier's life outside Hollywood had its ups and downs during the 1990s. In 1993 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, a situation that made the actor reevaluate his life. With several of his five daughters living on the east coast, Poitier and his wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, decided to invest more time away from their California home, with family or traveling. Traveling became even more of a factor in Poitier's life when, in 1997, he was cast in the real-life political role of ambassador to Japan for the Bahamas and was received by Japanese Emperor Akihito. In 2000 the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series American Masters aired a biography of Poitier, "Sidney Poitier: One Bright Light," directed by Lee Grant, who starred opposite Poitier in In the Heat of the Night.

In 2000, twenty years after his first memoir, Poitier reopened the door on his life with The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography. The book describes his early childhood in the Bahamas, as well as some of his greatest roles, such as in the major Broadway hit, A Raisin in the Sun, and the films The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night. In The Measure of a Man he also honors his parents' ability to hold onto their values in the face of life's challenges. Michael Moriarty commented to Los Angeles Times contributor Chris Dafoe of his co-star in Children of the Dust: "You see a face that you've grown up with and admired, someone who was an icon of America, a symbol of strength and persistence and grace. And then you find out that in the everyday, workaday world of doing movies, he is everything he symbolized on screen."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Bergman, Carol, Sidney Poitier, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 1988.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 26, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Ewers, Carolyn E., Sidney Poitier: The Long Journey, New American Library (New York, NY), 1981.

Goudsouzian, Aram, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2004.

Hoffman, William, Sidney, Lyle Stuart (New York, NY), 1971.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 3: Actors and Actresses, St. James Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Kelley, Samuel L., The Evolution of Character Portrayals in the Films of Sidney Poitier, 1950-1978, University of North Carolina Press (Jefferson, NC), 1983.

Keyser, Lester J., The Cinema of Sidney Poitier: TheBlack Man's Changing Role on the American Screen, A.S. Barnes (San Diego, CA), 1980.

Marill, Alvin H., The Films of Sidney Poitier, Citadel Press (Secaucus, NJ), 1978.

Null, Gary, Black Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures, Citadel Press (Secaucus, NJ), 1978.

Poitier, Sidney, This Life, Knopf (New York, NY), 1980.

Poitier, Sidney, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

Zinman, David, Fifty from the Fifties, Arlington, 1979.