POITIER, Sidney

(b. 20 February 1927 [some sources say 1927] in Miami, Florida), actor, civil rights activist, and motion picture director who in the 1960s became the first African-American film star in Hollywood history.

A native of Cat Island in the Bahamas, Poitier was born in Miami during a stopover by his parents, Reginald James and Evelyn (Outten) Poitier, who secured U.S. citizenship for him but little else. He was raised dirt poor with his seven siblings in Nassau, where his father barely made a living as a tomato farmer and his mother broke rocks to make gravel. In 1943, after a brief stay in Miami with his older brother, Poitier ran off to New York City. While Poitier, who had virtually no formal schooling, struggled to support himself by working as a dishwasher and tried to improve his reading skills, he strove to lose his Caribbean accent by listening to the radio. After an unhappy tour of duty in the army, he was discharged in December 1944, entered the American Negro Theater School, and began the daunting task of breaking the color line on the American stage. On 29 April 1950 Poitier married Juanita Hardy, a dancer; the couple raised four daughters.

A Hollywood screen test earned Poitier his first feature role as a doctor, not an orderly, who treats a racist patient in the film No Way Out (1950). Despite garnering good notices for his center-stage performances in No Way Out and Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), a tragedy set in South Africa, Poitier still had to hustle for supporting roles in other film projects and in live television drama. With The Blackboard Jungle (1955), where he played the most salvageable student in a rowdy classroom of urban delinquents, his luck changed for good. From the tense urban melodrama of Edge of the City (1957) to the songs and dances of Porgy and Bess (1959), he worked steadily throughout the 1950s, perhaps most memorably in The Defiant Ones (1958). In the latter film he and Tony Curtis portrayed escaped prisoners who must learn to put their prejudices aside to achieve liberation. Poitier and Curtis each earned Academy Award nominations as best actor for their culturally resonant face-offs (though neither of them won).

The civil rights revolution of the 1960s expanded Poitier's options and repertoire, even though the motion pictures tended to retread familiar screen territory rather than break new ground. In the Korean War film All the Young Men (1960), Poitier personifies the tensions of interracial command as a sergeant reluctant to assume leadership. More interesting and daring is Paris Blues (1961), which cast him against type as a moody expatriate jazzman performing in Paris to escape American racism and finally paired him with an African-American leading lady, Diahann Carroll. Personally if not professionally, the most meaningful film for Poitier during this period was the 1961 version of Lorraine Hansberry's searing play Raisin in the Sun (1959). Variety praised Poitier's "striking, commanding performance" as the son of a Chicago family fighting discriminatory housing patterns and oedipal pressures. The article went on to say, "There is a poetry in the very expression of his body movements … [which] convey physically but clearly the inner turmoil, the years of denial that the character has had to seal within himself."

In Lilies of the Field (1963), Poitier's quietly authoritative and immensely engaging performance as a handyman for a group of German nuns won him the Oscar as best actor. At the Academy Awards ceremony, a boisterous ovation greeted the reading of his name, recognition not only of the actor but also of the representative value of the occasion. "It has been a long journey to this moment," said a somber Poitier with typical understatement. Backstage that same evening, Poitier found himself instantly anointed as a spokesperson for black America. "The reporters feel that because I won an Academy Award, I'm some kind of political expert," he said at the time. "I'm what I always wanted to be—an actor. Why don't they ask me some questions about acting?"

The Oscar win catapulted Poitier to the Hollywood A-list, but whether in cold war thrillers (as a reporter aboard a submarine in The Bedford Incident, 1965) or schmaltzy interracial romances (as a tutor to a blind girl in A Patch of Blue, 1965), Poitier's erotic energy was kept in neutral. Not until his discreet clinch with the actress Abby Lincoln in For Love of Ivy (1968) did a popular Hollywood film feature a love scene between two African-American stars. Ironically, perhaps Poitier's most culturally significant role in the mid-1960s was his cameo appearance as Simon Peter in the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), which verified an African-American presence in the heretofore blue-eyed regions of the Hollywood Holy Land.

Poitier's golden year was 1967, when the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther called him "the most conspicuous and respected exponent of the American Negro on the screen." Astonishingly, three of his films—To Sir with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?—were the top box-office hits that year. In To Sir with Love, he stood on the other side of the blackboard jungle as a hip teacher ministering to London slum kids; the pop singer Lulu's plaintive title tune made achingly clear the romantic longing of a white girl for a black man.

Poitier's next two performances neatly expressed the African-American impulses to anger and assimilation during the 1960s. In In the Heat of the Night, he played the Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs, who, while traveling through a Dixie backwater, becomes first the suspect and then the solution to a local murder. The contrast of an aberrant, racist, Neanderthal South with an open-minded, idealistic, and integrationist North may have been a Hollywood conceit. When the redneck sheriff condescendingly addresses the detective as "Virgil" one too many times, however, an enraged Poitier spits out a rebuke that incited raucous cheers from audiences of all shades, "They call me MISTER Tibbs!"

In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, Stanley Kramer's then controversial treatment of interracial marriage, Poitier appears as a model future son-in-law except for one slight problem—his color. Tendentious and preachy in rhetoric and modest and discreet in imagery, the film was nonetheless a landmark in its time. Perhaps, too, compared with the ill-scrubbed, ill-mannered swains some daughters were bringing home to meet the folks, not a few 1960s parents would have been thrilled to have the accomplished and gentlemanly Poitier come to dinner.

Off-screen in the 1960s, Poitier positioned himself squarely in the mainstream of the civil rights movement; he marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and lent his emblematic presence to a number of progressive causes. Yet he never succumbed to the extremes of black militancy in either separatist rhetoric or personal style. As for his own contribution to the struggle for racial equality, he attributed his screen success to "being at the right place at the right time, one in that series of perfect accidents from which Fate fashions her grand design."

In the 1970s Poitier moved behind the camera to direct a series of highly successful comedy, caper, and genre films, including Buck and the Preacher (1972), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let's Do It Again (1975), A Piece of the Action (1977), and the blockbuster Stir Crazy (1980). After playing so many of what he called "saintly unreal" blacks, Poitier the auteur seemed to luxuriate in lighthearted fare featuring lovable rogues. "I wanted to make fun movies in which black people could sit in a theater and laugh at themselves without restraint—and feel good about it," Poitier recalled. After divorcing his first wife in 1965, Poitier married the actress Johanna Shimkus on 23 January 1976; they had two daughters.

Poitier's talent as an actor was inseparable from his color: he was a black man who played black men, and often black men who had been created by white screenwriters. As such, later generations of African-American activists came to see Poitier as too much the "good Negro" of the white liberal imagination: well spoken, well behaved, and white featured. Especially in the 1960s, when phrases like "a credit to his race" and "role model" became epithets, not compliments, Poitier was derided as a "paradigm of tokenism" and sneered at as an Uncle Tom by certain blacker-than-thou elements of the African-American community.

Over time, however, as tempers cooled and the shadings of Poitier's rich portrait gallery endured, the immensity of his artistic achievements was recognized and honored. At the 2002 Academy Awards, Poitier was presented with an Oscar for lifetime achievement, an apt tribute to an artist whose pioneering legacy extended far beyond the motion picture screen.

Poitier is the author of two memoirs, This Life (1980) and The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000). Critical studies of his work include Lester J. Keyser, The Cinema of Sidney Poitier: The Black Man's Changing Role on the American Screen (1980), and Samuel L. Kelley, The Evolution of Character Portrayals in the Films of Sidney Poitier (1983).

Thomas Doherty