Poitier, Sydney Tamiia

views updated

Sydney Tamiia Poitier

1973—

Actor

Sydney Tamiia Poitier shares most of her name with her famous father, Academy Award-winner Sidney Poitier. She admits that her name has sometimes helped open doors for her, but it has also been a mixed blessing. "I think I got a lot more auditions that way," she told Jet. "There were certainly higher expectations placed on me. And people have pre-conceived notions of me before I walk into a room because they're so familiar with my father. So, that actually works against you a little bit."

Poitier was born in 1973, exactly a decade after her father became the first African-American male to win an Oscar for a lead role, which he earned for his performance in the movie Lilies of the Field. The first African American to win an Academy Award was Butterfly McQueen in 1939 for her supporting role in Gone with the Wind. After Poitier's 1963 win, another twenty-eight years would pass before another black actor—Denzel Washington—would earn an Oscar for a lead role. Sydney Tamiia Poitier's mother, Joanna Shimkus, was an actor, too, and had appeared in the 1965 cult classic Paris vu par …, which featured vignettes of Paris made by several living legends of French cinema, among them Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard. She and Sidney Poitier appeared together in a 1969 film called The Lost Man, about a group of black militants planning a heist to fund their revolution. Shimkus's last film appearance was in the 1971 marital farce The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker alongside Richard Benjamin, and she gave birth to Sydney Tamiia Poitier's older sister, Anika, in early 1972.

Poitier was born in November of the following year, and her parents did not wed until 1976. This was a period of transition for her father, who was moving from acting to directing. "By the time I came along, my dad wasn't working as much, so he was home a lot," she told Champ Clark in People. That changed after Stir Crazy, which in 1980 became the highest-grossing film by an African-American director and remained in that spot until Scary Movie from Keenan Ivory Wayans twenty years later. Poitier grew up in the Los Angeles area with Anika and four stepsisters from her father's previous marriage, and she pursued a drama degree at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. It was at this point in her life that her parents voiced concern about the uneven job prospects and uncertain financial future for actors. "I was encouraged to have some sort of backup plan," she told Diane Baroni in Interview magazine. "They wanted me to be cautious and to know just how difficult it is to have an acting career. So while they were supportive, they were also smart and tried to get me to think things through."

Poitier also trained at the prestigious Stella Adler Conservatory and won her first film role in a small, little-seen 1998 film called Park Day, about African-American teens in Missouri. She followed that with a role in the Clint Eastwood blockbuster True Crime a year later, and she also made her first appearance alongside her father in Free of Eden, which aired on the Showtime cable channel. Based on a novel by Leon Ichaso, Free of Eden centered on the elder Poitier as a successful business mogul who reluctantly agrees to tutor a young woman from the projects, played by the younger Poitier. "It was weird the first week we had rehearsals," she said in an interview with Jet, when asked what it had been like to work with a parent. "I just kept cracking up. It was so hard for me to look him in the face and treat him as this character and not my dad. I just kept seeing Dad. After a couple of days, it was fine, but in the beginning I was giggling uncontrollably."

As her parents had feared, Poitier struggled to find meaningful roles and maintain a steady income. In 2001 she appeared in MacArthur Park, a gritty fictional look at drug addicts in the famous Los Angeles landmark park, and in 2003 she was surprised to win a starring role in a television sitcom. The series was called Abby and ran for just four episodes on UPN. She played a San Francisco sports producer, Abigail "Abby" Walker, who is forced to remain roommates with her ex-boyfriend, played by Kadeem Hardison. Following the series' abrupt cancellation, Poitier appeared in eight episodes of Joan of Arcadia in 2003 and 2004, followed by a seven-episode run on Veronica Mars.

In 2004 Poitier and her sister Anika teamed to make The Devil Cats, a faux documentary about a fictional all-female rock band. Anika wrote and directed the comedy, and Poitier produced it and appeared as one of the musicians. A year later, Poitier appeared in the large, all-star ensemble cast for the film Nine Lives, featuring a series of interconnected stories about nine women in Los Angeles. In 2006 she was cast in the Snoop Dogg cautionary moral tale/horror film Hood of Horror, but earned more attention in early 2007 for her part in Grindhouse. The dual-story movie from directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez was designed to be a send-up of racy horror movies of an earlier era, and in Tarantino's "Death Proof" segment she appeared as Jungle Julia, one of the actresses terrorized by a psychotic stuntman played by Kurt Russell. Later in 2007, the two halves of the movie were released separately, under their respective segment titles.

Poitier is grateful to her parents for their advice, and in retrospect she admits they may have been right to want her to have a backup plan. "I have a very romantic view of the business because of the movies my dad made and that I watched growing up," she told Detroit Free Press writer Mike Duffy. Two of Sidney Poitier's most memorable roles were in the interracial dating comedy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and the civil rights drama In the Heat of the Night, both critically acclaimed films from 1967. "They don't make movies like that anymore," she noted. In spite of knowing the pitfalls of following in her father's footsteps, she is thankful for her father's generous store of wisdom. "I have someone to go to at all times for advice in this crazy business," she told Duffy. "And this is a hard, weird business."

At a Glance …

Born November 15, 1973, in Los Angeles, CA; daughter of Sidney Poitier and Joanna Shimkus. Education: Earned degree from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University; studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory.

Career: Made film debut in Park City, 1998; cast in the television series First Years, 2001, and Abby, 2003.

Addresses: Agent—International Creative Management, 8942 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90211.