The trailblazing actor who broke Hollywood’s color barrier

Sidney Poitier 1927–2022

Sidney Poitier was America’s first Black movie star. In a string of leading roles in the 1950s and ’60s, the tall, charismatic Bahamian upended a long tradition of Black actors playing entertainers or servants and gave audiences something unprecedented: Black characters with poise, dignity, and authority. He was the first Black nominee for a Best Actor Oscar, for his portrayal of an escaped prisoner chained to a white racist in 1958’s The Defiant Ones. Five years later he became the first to win that Oscar, in his role as an itinerant handyman who helps a group of nuns build a church in Lilies of the Field. His fame hit a peak in 1967, when he starred in three major hits: To Sir, With Love, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—a tabooshattering film about an interracial couple—and In the Heat of the Night, in which he gave his most celebrated performance, as a Philadelphia detective who helps a racist Mississippi sheriff (Rod Steiger) investigate a murder. An active voice in the civil rights movement, Poitier faced criticism from more militant Blacks for playing sainted characters unthreatening to whites—a criticism he understood but rejected. “There’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose,” he wrote, “but that’s never been my role.”

The seventh child of Bahamian tomato farmers, Poitier grew up on Cat Island, “an impoverished, 45-mile-long narrow strip of land with no plumbing or electricity,” said the Los Angeles Times. He quit school at age 13 and worked as a water boy for ditch diggers to help support the family. At 15, he was jailed overnight for stealing ears of corn, and his concerned father sent him to live with an older brother in Miami. Stunned by the racism he encountered, he soon left for New York City, arriving with “less than $4 in his pocket.” He slept on rooftops and, on cold nights, in pay toilet cubicles, until he landed a dishwashing job and moved into “a $5-a-week room in Harlem.”

In 1945, Poitier responded to a newspaper ad seeking actors for the American Negro Theater, said The New York Times. His audition, in which he read “haltingly” in a thick Bahamian accent, “was a flop.” But he bought a cheap radio and practiced English by copying announcers, and was accepted to the theater’s acting school in exchange for free janitorial work.

Given a stage role, he impressed a Broadway producer and was cast in an all-black production of Lysistrata, then a road show of Anna Lucasta. He landed his “first substantial film role” in 1950’s No Way Out, playing a doctor antagonized by a racist patient. “A sprinkling of film and television roles” followed, but Poitier “still bounced between acting jobs and menial work.” He hit “a turning point” when cast as a troubled student in the 1955 hit Blackboard Jungle, said The Guardian, and as Hollywood “belatedly tackled racial themes” in the following years, “Poitier gradually emerged as a star.”

Handsome and confident, Poitier could “fume with barely suppressed rage” on screen, said Variety. But his “disciplined restraint provoked his more militant critics,” who labeled him “a Stepin Fetchit in a gray flannel suit.” Stung by the criticism and tiring of racial politics, he “retreated to the Bahamas for a few years,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), and “when he re-emerged in the early 1970s, it was as a director.” While none of his output earned critical praise, he helmed several hits, including the prison comedy Stir Crazy (1980), starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. In later years, his most celebrated work was on TV, playing Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in Separate but Equal (1991) and Nelson Mandela in Mandela and de Klerk (1997). By then his achievements had begun to be recognized and he was showered with honors, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a lifetime achievement Oscar. Poitier insisted he’d simply been in the right place at the right time, “selected almost by history itself.” But, he wrote, “I am nonetheless gratified at having been chosen.”