Theresa Fedeli

Theresa Larobina Fedeli, 91, died Tuesday, January 5, at home after a long illness.

She was born in Stamford on January 11, 1930, the youngest daughter of Mary Stramandonoli Larobina and Dominick Larobina.

Theresa attended Stamford public schools and graduated from Stamford High School in 1947. She attended J.M. Wright Technical and graduated in 1948 with a license in beauty culture.

In 1950, Theresa married her childhood sweetheart, Dante B. Fedeli. They were married for 68 years before Mr. Fedeli’s death in 2018.

She worked in Stamford beauty parlors for 14 years including Vanity Fair and Tint and Tone.

Theresa later worked as a teacher’s aide at Rice Elementary School and Saint John’s Parochial School, where she forged life-long relationships with many of her students.

She was a parishioner of St. Clement Church for 70 years.

A longtime member of the Saint Clement’s Ladies Guild, she used her organizational and social skills to plan and operate many parish events including church fairs, tag and bake sales and raffles. Theresa was a longtime member of the Columbiettes.

She was awarded Mother of the Year by the District Council of Catholic churches in 2003. Theresa was awarded the prestigious Saint Augustine Medal of Service by the Diocese of Bridgeport in 2006.

She practiced her Catholic faith by working in Stamford soup kitchens and other local charities for many years and often performed personal acts of charity for Stamford’s poor, sick and homeless people.

Theresa was a vivacious fun-loving woman who together.

“For over 80 years, Sidney and I laughed, cried and made as much mischief as we could,“he wrote. “He was truly my brother and partner in trying to make this world a little better. He certainly made mine a whole lot better.”

Few movie stars, Black or white, had such an influence both on and off the screen. Before Poitier, the son of Bahamian tomato farmers, no Black actor had a sustained career as a lead performer or could get a film produced based on his own star power. Before Poitier, few Black actors were permitted a break from the stereotypes of bugeyed servants and grinning entertainers. Before Poitier, Hollywood filmmakers rarely even attempted to tell a Black greatly enjoyed parties and family get togethers. Always the life of the party, she loved a good story or a good song by Sinatra, Elvis and Fats Domino, often singing along with them on the radio.

She was a kind, unselfish and generous wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother who loved her extended family with absolute loyalty.

Theresa was predeceased by her husband Dante B. Fedeli, her sister Katherine Macari and her parents, Dominick and Mary Larobina.

She is survived by her three children: Frank M. Fedeli and his wife, Mary Ann, Richard J. Fedeli and Mary Lisa Fedeli all of Stamford, four grandchildren, five great grandchildren, three nieces and four nephews.

The Fedeli family is very grateful for the fine and loving care Sil Tarozza gave to our mother for four years.

Contributions in Theresa’s name may be made to Saint Clement Church and to ARI of Connecticut (Always Reaching For Indepence).

Visitation will be held from 9 am to 11 am on Monday, January 10, 2022 at THOMAS M. GALLAGHER FUNERAL HOME (same building as Cognetta Funeral Home) 104 Myrtle Ave Stamford, CT (203)-3599999. A Mass of Christian Burial will immediately follow at 12 pm on Monday, January 10, 2022 at St Clement of Rome 535 Fairfield Ave Stamford, CT. Interment will follow at St John Cemetery Darien, CT.

The arrangements are under the care of Thomas M. Gallagher Funeral Home. To send on-line condolences to the family, please visit www.gallagherfuneralhome person’s story.

Messages honoring and mourning Poitier flooded social media, with Oscar winner Morgan Freeman calling him “my inspiration, my guiding light, my friend” and Oprah Winfrey praising him as a “Friend. Brother. Confidant. Wisdom teacher.” Former President Barack Obama cited his achievements and how he revealed “the power of movies to bring us closer together.”

Poitier’s rise mirrored profound changes in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. As racial attitudes evolved during the civil rights era and segregation laws were challenged and fell, Poitier was the performer to whoma cautious industry turned for stories of progress.

He was the escaped Black convict who befriends a racist white prisoner (Tony Curtis) in “The Defiant Ones.” He was the courtly office worker who falls in love with a blind white girl in “A Patch of Blue.” He was the handyman in “Lilies of the Field” who builds a church for a group of nuns. In one of the great roles of the 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.”

Debates about diversity in Hollywood inevitably turn to the story of Poitier. With his handsome, flawless face; intense stare and disciplined style, he was for years not just the most popular Black movie star, but the only one.

“I made films when the only other Black on the lot was the shoeshine boy,” he recalled in a 1988 Newsweek interview. “I was kind of the lone guy in town.”

Poitier peaked in 1967 with three of the year’s most notable movies: “To Sir, With Love,” in which he starred as a school teacher who wins over his unruly students at a London secondary school; “In the Heat of the Night,” as the determined police detective Virgil Tibbs; and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” as the prominent doctor who wishes to marry a young white woman he only recently met, her parents played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in their final film together.

Angela O’Neill passed away of natural causes, on November 10, 2021 at Atria Crossroads in Waterford, CT. She was born in Stamford on Oct. 27, 1929 to Vito and Frances Laraia Sciglimpaglia.

She was a graduate of Greenwich High School and the Stamford Hospital School of Nursing Class of 1950. She was an active Registered Nurse until retiring to Old Saybrook, CT in 1996 where she volunteered locally, including at the Senior Center.

Beside her parents, she

Erin Margaret Sherwood passed away on January 4th, 2022 after a courageous battle with Glioblastoma at age 33.

Erin is survived by her son, her pride and joy, Ciaran Augustus Sherwood, her mother Patricia Gavin Mullins of Trinity, NC., her father Douglas Sherwood of Leesburg, FL., her brother Zachary Sherwood of San Jose, CA., and many Aunts, Uncles and cousins whom she loved.

Erin graduated from Darian High School class of 2006. She attended The Connecticut Culinary Institute, then continued her education at Johnson and Wales University graduating Magnum Cum Laude in 2013.

Erin resided in Knoxville

Theater owners named Poitier the No. 1 star of 1967, the first time a Black actor topped the list. In 2009 President Barack Obama, whose own steady bearing was sometimes compared to Poitier’s, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that the actor “not only entertained but enlightened… revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together.”

His appeal brought him burdens not unlike such other historical figures as Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was subjected to bigotry from whites and accusations of compromise from the Black community. Poitier was held, and held himself, to standards well above his white peers. He refused to play cowards and took on characters, especially in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” of almost divine goodness. He developed a steady, but resolved and occasionally humorous persona crystallized in his most famous line — “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” — from “In the Heat of the Night.”

“All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value — to you I say, ‘I’m not talking about being as good as you. I hereby declare myself better than you,’” he wrote in his memoir, “The Measure of a Man,” published in 2000.

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

Stardom didn’t shield Poitier from racism and condescension. He had a hard time finding housing in Los Angeles and was followed by the Ku Klux Klan when he was also predeceased by her brother Louis, and hèr husband Patrick J. O’Neill, Jr.

She is survived by her daughter, Patrice Jones (Terry), hèr son Thomas (Nancy), three grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

As per her wishes, her body was donated to the UCONN Anatomical Donation Program. A private service will take place at a future time.

TN. She was employed by Compass Group and was an active member of the community.

A celebration of life to be held at Creekside Park, Archdale NC. Charitable donations in Erin’s name can be made to Gray Matters Foundation which offers an online portal. visited Mississippi in 1964, not long after three civil rights workers had been murdered there. In interviews, journalists often ignored his work and asked him instead about race and current events.

“I am an artist, man, American, contemporary,” he snapped during a 1967 press conference. “I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due.”

Poitier was not as engaged politically as his close friend and great contemporary Harry 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 defended himself and risked his career. He refused to sign loyalty oaths during the 1950s, when Hollywood was barring suspected Communists, and turned down roles he found offensive.

“Almost all the job opportunities were reflective of the stereotypical perception of Blacks that had infected the whole consciousness of the country,” he recalled. “I came with an inability to do those things. It just wasn’t in me. I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.”

Poitier’s films were usually about personal triumphs rather than broad political themes, but the classic Poitier role, from “In the Heat of the Night” to “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” was as a Black man of such decency and composure — Poitier became synonymous with the word “dignified” — that he wins over the whites opposed to him.

“Sidney Poitier epitomized dignity and grace,” Obama tweeted Friday.

His screen career faded in the late 1960s as political movements, Black and white, became more radical and movies more explicit. He acted less often, gave fewer interviews and began directing, his credits including the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder farce “Stir Crazy,” “Buck and the Preacher” (co-starring Poitier and Belafonte) and the Bill Cosby comedies “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Let’s Do It Again.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, he appeared in the feature films “Sneakers” and “The Jackal” and several television movies, receiving an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination as future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in “Separate But Equal” and an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and De Klerk.” Theatergoers were reminded of the actor through an acclaimed play that featured him in name only: John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” about a con artist claiming to be Poitier’s son.

In recent years, a new generation learned of him through Oprah Winfrey, who chose “The Measure of a Man” for her book club. Meanwhile, he welcomed the rise of such Black stars as Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Danny Glover: “It’s like the cavalry coming to relieve the troops! You have no idea how pleased I am,” he said.

Poitier received numerous honorary prizes, including a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute and a special Academy Award in 2002, on the same night that Black performers won both best acting awards, Washington for “Training Day” and Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”

“I’ll always be chasing you, Sidney,” Washington, who had earlier presented the honorary award to Poitier, said during his acceptance speech. “I’ll always be following in your footsteps. There’s nothing I would rather do, sir, nothing I would rather do.”

Poitier had four daughters with his first wife, Juanita Hardy, and two with his second wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, who starred with him in his 1969 film “The Lost Man.” Daughter Sydney Tamaii Poitier appeared on such television series as “Veronica Mars” and “Mr. Knight.”

His life ended in adulation, but it began in hardship. Poitier was born prematurely, 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 he quit school at 121⁄2 2to help support the family. Three years later, he was sent to live with a brother in Miami; his father was concerned that the street life of Nassau was a bad influence. With $3 in his pocket, Sidney traveled steerage on a mail-cargo ship.

“The smell in that portion of the boat was so horrendous that I spent a goodly part of the crossing heaving over the side,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, adding that Miami soon educated him about racism. “I learned quite quickly that there were places I couldn’t go, that I would be questioned if I wandered into various neighborhoods.”

Poitier moved to Harlem and was so overwhelmed by his first winter there he enlisted in the Army, cheating on his age and swearing he was 18 when he had yet to turn 17. Assigned to a mental hospital on Long Island, Poitier was appalled at how cruelly the doctors and nurses treated the soldier patients. In his 1980 autobiography, “This Life,” he related how he escaped the Army by feigning insanity.

Back in Harlem, he was looking in the Amsterdam News for a dishwasher job when he noticed an ad seeking actors at the American Negro Theater. He went there and was handed a script and told to go on the stage. Poitier had never seen a play in his life and could barely read. He stumbled through his lines in a thick Caribbean accent and the director marched him to the door.

“As I walked to the bus, what humiliated me was the suggestion that all he could see in me was a dishwasher. If I submitted to him, I would be aiding him in making that perception a prophetic one,” Poitier later told the AP.

“I got so pissed, I said, ‘I’m going to become an actor — whatever that is. I don’t want to be an actor, but I’ve got to become one to go back there and show him that I could be more than a dishwasher.’ That became my goal.”

The process took months as he sounded out words from the newspaper. Poitier returned to the American Negro Theater and was again rejected. Then he made a deal: He would act as janitor for the theater in return for acting lessons. When he was released again, his fellow students urged the teachers to let him be in the class play. Another Caribbean, Belafonte, was cast in the lead. When Belafonte couldn’t make a preview performance because it conflicted with his own janitorial duties, his understudy, Poitier, went on.

The audience included a Broadway producer who cast him in an all-Black version of “Lysistrata.” The play lasted four nights, but rave reviews for Poitier won him an understudy job in “Anna Lucasta,” and later he played the lead in the road company. In 1950, he broke through on screen in “No Way Out,” playing a doctor whose patient, a white man, dies and is then harassed by the patient’s bigoted brother, played by Richard Widmark.

Key early films included “Blackboard Jungle,” featuring Poitier as a tough high school student (the actor was well into his 20s at the time) in a violent school; and “The Defiant Ones,” which brought Poitier his first best actor nomination, and the first one for any Black male. The theme of cultural differences turned lighthearted in “Lilies of the Field,” in which Poitier played a Baptist handyman who builds a chapel for a group of Roman Catholic nuns, refugees from Germany. In one memorable scene, he gives them an English lesson.

Poitier