Hollywood’s first black superstar
Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winner and diplomat, dies at 94
AN icon, a hero, a fighter... Hollywood legend Sidney Poitier blazed a trail with his talent and grace, showing others how to reach for the stars.
Statesmen and screen legends alike told of their love and respect for the actor, civil rights activist and diplomat who died aged 94 on Thursday evening.
The first black winner of a Best Actor Oscar, Poitier refused to play roles that traded on stereotypes and many of his films explored racial tensions amid the civil rights movement.
He won millions of fans and inspired generations of black actors – including Denzel Washington, who on becoming the second black Best Actor at the 2001 Oscars, said to Poitier: “I’ll always be following in your footsteps. There’s nothing I would rather do, sir.”
Paying tribute yesterday, former US president Barack Obama said: “Through his groundbreaking roles and singular talent, Sidney Poitier epitomised dignity and grace, revealing the power of movies to bring us closer together. He also opened doors for a generation of actors.”
Patrick Gaspard, who served as US ambassador to South Africa under Obama, said explaining Poitier’s influence is “like trying to explain the concept of gravity”. He added: “He has had a seismic impact on black representation.”
US TV host Oprah Winfrey said: “The utmost, highest regard and praise for his most magnificent, gracious, eloquent life. I treasure him. I adored him. He had an enormous soul I will forever cherish.”
Bahamas deputy prime minister Chester Cooper said: “He did so much to show the world that those from the humblest beginnings can change the world... We have lost an icon. A hero, a mentor, a fighter, a national treasure.”
Actress Whoopi Goldberg added: “He showed us how to reach for the stars.”
Poitier was born in Miami in 1927, the seventh child of Bahamian farmers Evelyn and Reginald Poitier, who had gone to the US to sell tomatoes.
He was born two months early and his
We have lost an icon, a hero, a mentor, a fighter, a treasure
CHESTER COOPER BAHAMAS DEPUTY PM
chance of survival was so remote that his father brought home a shoebox to bury him in.
But he survived and his parents took him back to their remote farm on Cat Island in the Bahamas, with no power, running water or paved roads.
When he was 15, he returned to Florida to live with his brother before making his way to Harlem, New York, where he worked as a dishwasher.
After serving in the army, he returned to Harlem where, between pot-washing jobs, he joined the American Negro Theater.
He eventually made it to Broadway, kicking off his stage career with a role in Lysistrata.
His film career took off in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s racially charged 1950 thriller No Way Out. He went on to play a minister in 1951’s Cry, the Beloved Country, set in apartheid-era South Africa, and an angry student in 1955’s The Blackboard Jungle. But for a long time he was a rare black man in an overwhelmingly white industry.
In 1959, he got an Oscar nomination for his role in The Defiant Ones.
He did not win that time but victory came five years later with Lilies of the Field. His best-known roles include those in 1967 films In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and To Sir, with Love.
In 1969, he set up the First Artists production company with Barbra Streisand and Paul Newman, who were later joined by Steve McQueen.
He made his directing debut with the 1972 Western Buck and the Preacher, co-starring with Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee. But his biggest success behind the camera came with 1980’s Stir Crazy, starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder as a pair of misfits mistakenly sent to prison.
As well as his huge film output, Poitier was also a tireless civil rights activist.
He said he felt he was too often praised as a noble symbol of his race and faced criticism from some black people who claimed he had betrayed them by taking roles and pandering to whites.
He told Oprah Winfrey in 2000: “It’s been an enormous responsibility.
“And I accepted it and I lived in a way that showed how I respected that responsibility. I had to. In order for others to come behind me, there were certain things I had to do.”
He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974. In 1997, aged 70, he was made Bahamian ambassador to Japan. In 2009, President Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He had four children with first wife Juanita Hardy and two with second wife Joanna Shimkus, who he wed in 1976. He is survived by Joanna and his six daughters, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Poitier once said: “I do know that I’m responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.”
What he made of it is now his great legacy.