Oscar winner and groundbreaking star Sidney Poitier dies

NEW YORK (AP) — Sidney Poitier, the phenomenal actor and enduring inspiration who portrayed black people on screen, became the first black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Leading Performance and the first to top box-office titles. Draw, died. He was 94 years old.

Poitier, winner of the 1964 Best Actor Oscar for "Lilies of the Field," died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles, according to Latre Rahming, communications director for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas. His close friend and great contemporary Harry Belafonte issued a statement on Friday, remembering his extraordinary times.

"For over 80 years, Sydney and I have laughed, cried and played as many pranks as we could," he wrote. "He was really my brother and partner in trying to make this world a little better. He's definitely made me a whole lot better."

Few movie stars, black or white, had such an impact both on and off the screen. Before Poitier, the son of Bahamian tomato farmers, no black actor had a sustained career as a lead actor or could produce a film based on his own star power. Before Poitier, few black actors were allowed a break from the stereotype of bug-eyed servants and smiling entertainers. Before Poitier, Hollywood filmmakers rarely attempted to tell the story of a black person.

Poitier's respect and condolence messages flooded social media, with Oscar winner Morgan Freeman praising him as "my inspiration, my guiding light, my friend" and Oprah Winfrey as a "friend." brother. Confidant. Wisdom teacher. Former President Barack Obama cited his achievements and how he revealed "the power of films to bring us together."

The rise of Poitier marked a profound change in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. As racial attitudes developed and segregation laws were challenged and fallen during the civil rights era, Poitier was the artist to whom a cautious industry turned to stories of progress.

He is the surviving black criminal who befriends a racist white prisoner (Tony Curtis) in "The Defiant Ones". He was a court office worker who falls in love with a blind blonde girl in "A Patch of Blue". He was supposed to work in the "Lilies of the Field" which builds a church for a group of nuns. In one of the great roles of 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."

The debate about diversity in Hollywood inevitably turns into Poitier's story. With your beautiful, flawless face; Intense staring and disciplined style, he was for years not only the most popular black movie star, but the only one.

"I made movies when the only other black shoeshine boy on the lot was," he recalled in a 1988 Newsweek interview. "I was the only man in town."

Poitier peaked in 1967 with three of the year's most notable films: "To Sir, With Love," in which he starred as a schoolteacher who wins over his unruly students at a London secondary school; "In the Heat of the Night," as determined police detective Virgil Tibbs; And in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", as a leading doctor who wants to marry a young white woman he recently met, his parents play Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in his final film. was played by.

Theater owners named Poitier the No. 1 star of 1967, the first time a black actor had topped the list. In 2009 President Barack Obama, whose own steadfast bearing has sometimes been compared to Poitier's, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that the actor "not only entertained but enlightened ... Unveils the power of the silver screen to bring you together."

His appeal did not burden him, unlike other historical figures such as Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was subjected to accusations of bigotry against whites and compromise with the black community. Poitier was held, and held himself to standards, above his white peers. He refused to play cowards and took on characters, most notably in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", almost divine goodness. He developed a steady, but determined and sometimes humorous personality in his most famous line - "They call me Mr. Tibbs!" — From "In the Heat of the Night".

"All who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given to deprive me of value - I say to you, 'I am not talking of being as good as you. I hereby consider myself better than you declare," he wrote in his memoir, "The Measure of a Man," published in 2000.

But he was criticized for being out of touch even in his prime. He was called Uncle Tom and the "million-dollar shoeshine boy". In 1967, The New York Times published an essay by Black playwright Clifford Mason, "Why Do 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 is wrong with the world".

Stardom didn't save Poitier from racism and condescension. He had a hard time finding housing in Los Angeles, and then came the Ku Klux Klan when he visited Mississippi in 1964, shortly after three civil rights activists were murdered there. In interviews, journalists often overlooked his work and instead asked him about race and current events.

"I am an artist, man, American, contemporary," he said during a 1967 press conference. "I am a lot of things, so I wish you would give me due respect."

Poitier was not as politically engaged as Belafonte, leading to occasional conflicts between them. But he was active in the 1963 March on Washington and other civil rights events, and as an actor he defended himself and risked his career. He refused to sign an oath of allegiance during the 1950s, when Hollywood was barring suspected communists, and turned down roles he found objectionable.

“Almost all job opportunities reflected the stereotypical perception of blacks that had infected the entire consciousness of the country,” he recalled. "I came in with an inability to do those things. It just wasn't in me. I chose to use my work as a reflection of my values."

Poitier's films were generally about personal victories rather than broader political themes, but classic Poitier roles, from "In the Heat of the Night" to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", were an act of such complacency and restraint. It was as a black man – Poitier became synonymous with the word “dignified” – that he wins over the whites in his opposition.

"Sydney Poitier is the epitome of dignity and grace," Obama tweeted Friday.

His screen career faded in the late 1960s, as political movements, black and white, more radical and films became more explicit. He acted less frequently, gave fewer interviews and began directing, including the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder Fares "Stir Crazy," "Buck and the Preacher" (co-starring Poitier and Belafonte) and the Bill Cosby comedies "Uptown Saturday Night". Huh. "and" Let's Do It Again."

In the 1980s and '90s, he appeared in the feature films "Sneakers" and "The Jackal" and several television films, including "Separate But Equal" and an Emmy nomination as future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in an Emmy and Received a Golden Globe nomination. For his portrayal of Nelson Mandela in "Mandela and de Klerk". Theater-goers were reminded of the actor through an acclaimed play that featured him in name only: John Gere's "Six Degrees of Separation", about a con artist who claims to be Poitier's son. .

In recent years, a new generation learned of him through Oprah Winfrey, who chose "The Major of a Man" for her book club. Meanwhile, he welcomed the rise of black stars like Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Danny Glover: "It's like cavalry coming in to relieve the soldiers! You have no idea how happy I am," he added. .

Poitier received several honorary awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and a special Academy Award in 2002, the same night that Black Performers won Best Acting Awards, for "Training Day" in Washington and "Monster's Ball". For Halle Berry. ,

"I will always follow you, Sydney," Washington, who previously presented an honorary award to Poitier, said during his acceptance speech. "I'll always follow in your footsteps. There's nothing I'd like to do, sir, I wouldn't do instead."

Poitier had four daughters with his first wife, Juanita Hardy, and two with his second wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, who starred alongside him in his 1969 film "The Lost Man." Daughter Sidney Tamai Poitier "Veronica Mars" and "Mr. Knight." Daughter Gina Poitier-Gourage passed away in 2018.

"She is our guiding light who has illuminated our lives with infinite love and wonder. Her smile was healing, her embrace was the warmest shelter, and her laughter was infectious. We can always turn to her for wisdom and solace. And her absence feels like a huge hole in our hearts and in our hearts,” her family said in a statement. “Although she is no longer with us in this area, her beautiful spirit will continue to guide and inspire us. "

His life ended in worship, but it began in hardship. Poitier was born premature, weighing just 3 pounds, in Miami, where his parents had gone to deliver tomatoes from their farm on tiny Cat Island in the Bahamas. He spent his early years on the remote island, which had a population of 1,500 and no electricity, and dropped out of school at 12 1/2 to support the family. Three years later, he was sent to live with a brother in Miami; His father was concerned that Nassau's street life was a bad influence. With $3 in his pocket, Sidney made the steerage trip on a mail-cargo ship.

"The smell in that part of the boat was so awful that I passed a good portion of the crossing over shore," he told the Associated Press in 1999, adding that Miami soon educated him about racism. "I learned very quickly that there are places I can't go that if I wandered through different neighborhoods I would be questioned."

Poitier moved to Harlem and was so overwhelmed by his first winter that he enlisted in the army, betraying his age and swearing that he was 18 when he was yet to turn 17. Appointed to a mental hospital on Long Island, Poitier was amazed at how doctors and nurses ruthlessly treated soldier patients. In his 1980 autobiography, "This Life", he described how he escaped from the army by pretending to be insane.

Back in Harlem, he was looking in the Amsterdam News for a job as a dishwasher when he saw an ad at the American Negro Theater looking for actors. They went there and were handed a script and asked to go on stage. Poitier had never seen a play in his life and could hardly read. He stumbled through his lines in a rough Caribbean accent and the director escorted him to the door.

“What offended me as I got on the bus was that he could see a dishwasher in me. If I presented it to him, I would help him make that notion a prophetic one,” Poitier later said. I told the AP.

"I got so annoyed, I said, 'I'm going to be an actor - whatever. I don't want to be an actor, but I have to be one to go back out there and show him that I'm more than a dishwasher. I can. It became my goal.

The process took months as he pulled the words out of the newspaper. Poitier returned to the American Negro Theater and was again rejected. Then he struck a deal: He would work as a janitor for the theater in exchange for acting lessons. When he was released again, his fellow students urged teachers to let him be in the classroom game. Another Caribbean, Belafonte, was cast in the lead role. When Belafonte couldn't perform a preview because it conflicted with his own janitor duties, his understanding, Poitier went.

The audience included a Broadway producer who cast her in an all-black version of "Lysistretta." The play lasted four nights, but rave reviews for Poitier landed her a savvy job in "Anna Lucasta," and she later landed a lead role in Road Company. In 1950, he played an on-screen doctor in "No Way Out" whose patient, a white man, dies and is then harassed by the patient's older brother, played by Richard Widmark.

Major early films included "Blackboard Jungle", which featured Poitier as a tough high school student (the actor was in his 20s at the time) in a violent school; and "The Defiant Ones," which gave Poitier his first Best Actor nomination, and the first for any black male. The theme of cultural differences is lightened in "Lilies of the Field", in which Poitier plays a Baptist handyman who builds a chapel for a group of Roman Catholic nuns, refugees from Germany. In a memorable scene, he teaches them English lessons.

The only black actor before Poitier to win a competitive Oscar was Hattie McDaniel, who won Best Supporting Actress in 1939 for "Gone with the Wind." No one, including Poitier, considered "Lilies of the Field" to be his best film, but the timing was right (Congress would soon pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Poitier lobbied for) and the actor was even pitied against such contestants. Preferences were made such as Paul Newman for "Hud" and Albert Finney for "Tom Jones". Newman was in favor of Poitier.

When presenter Anne Bancroft announced her victory, the audience cheered so long that Poitier momentarily forgot her speech. "It has been a long journey to this moment," he declared.

Poitier never pretended that his Oscar was "a magic wand" for black actors, as he saw it after their victory, and he shared his critics' dismay with some of the roles, believing that his The characters were sometimes so asexual that they became kind of "neuter". But he also considered himself lucky and encouraged those who followed him.

“To the young African American filmmakers who have come to the playground, I am so proud to have you here. I'm sure, like me, you've discovered that it was never impossible, it was only hard," he said in 1992, receiving a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute. ,

"Welcome, young blacks. Those of us who go before you look back with contentment and leave you with one simple belief: Be true to yourself and be useful for the journey.