Sidney Poitier was no Uncle Tom. He was a trailblazing star
ABOUT 25 years ago, on assignment in Los Angeles, I had breakfast in a swanky hotel, trying, and mostly failing, not to stare at the movie star on a nearby table. Off screen as well as on, Sidney Poitier drew the eye.
His death last week, at the age of 94, brought up the end-credits on a life unlike any other. I once went to a lecture at Cambridge University given by a friend of mine, the film historian Colin Shindler. His subject that day was Sidney Poitier and the Civil Rights movement.
In 1958 Poitier starred with Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, Stanley Kramer’s powerful drama about two escaped convicts — one black, one white — who must learn to overcome their mutual racial hatred and cooperate for the very good reason that they are shackled together.
Both Poitier and Curtis were nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor. It was the first time a black actor had ever been nominated in that august category and he really should have won, but Hollywood evidently wasn’t ready to anoint a black man with its ultimate accolade. David Niven, a safer bet, got the Oscar instead, for Separate Tables.
Nevertheless, as Colin pointed out in his lecture, the landscape was changing. In 1950s pictures, black actors usually played either servants or entertainers. Poitier’s brilliant performance in The Defiant Ones showed other possibilities. Mind you, he was still a convict, and five years later, when he did make his Oscar breakthrough, for Lilies Of The Field (1963), he played an itinerant worker.
But as the Civil Rights movement gathered pace, shifting attitudes were reflected in Poitier’s roles. He played educated professionals, a detective and a doctor, in In The Heat Of The Night and another Stanley Kramer movie, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? (both 1967).
Yet by then, militant black activists considered Poitier an ‘Uncle Tom’. They pointed out that his character in Kramer’s new film was almost risibly talented, decent, dignified and wholesome, and moreover had suffered a devastating personal tragedy, rendering him as sympathetic as possible and softening the prospect of interracial marriage with the daughter of elderly liberals played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
A braver film, they said, would not have made him such a doughty paragon of virtue. He had sold out, they asserted, by playing a black man so tolerable to whites.
Well, maybe. But all he could do was either accept the roles offered to him, or not accept them. We should all be grateful he chose the former. As most people, black and white, eventually came to realise, Poitier was a true trailblazer as well as a terrific, charismatic actor. With his passing we have lost a genuine screen icon.