Remembering Sidney Poitier
Sidney Poitier - Paul Archuleta
The world mourns this week the death of one of the brightest old Hollywood stars, who passed away last Thursday in his Beverly Hills home. Sidney Poitier’s career helped pave the way for future generations of actors of color. His roles as a determined man in films like To Sir With Love, In The Heat Of The Night, and the classic Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner established him as one the first black icons of Hollywood.
Born in Miami in 1927, Poitier was originally from the Bahamas and joined the American Negro Theatre school based in New York at the young age of 16. It wasn’t until 1958 that he would be cast in his break-out role in The Defiant Ones, about two prison escapees, for which he and Tony Curtis got Academy Award nominations for best actor in a leading role and best actor in a supporting role. Poitier would soon after in 1963 become the first African American and Bahamian American to win an Oscar in a lead acting role in Lilies of the Field. The 1967 instant classic Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner is considered as a canon film of the 1960s and of film history in general. He showed the world that a black actor can take on the lead role and not always be cast as the funny sidekick, the loyal servant, or the lively musician. Breaking away from the roles that black actors and actresses had historically been assigned in Hollywood mixed with his excellence in acting turned him into one of the greatest icons of the 1960s, which, when compared to other the prominent figures of that decade, is saying a lot.
Poitier’s actions in real life sometimes contrasted with the successful Black characters he portrayed in many films of the 1960s. As Civil Rights movements and Black Activism were on a rise during this decade, Sidney suffered criticism from his contemporaries as being too “safe”, similar to the kind of criticism Dr. Martin Luther King had to face during the times of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. But Sidney was an activist at heart and chose his films with much care. In 1967 he portrayed a detective following a murder case in In The Heat Of The Night. The Philadelphia city cop follows a lead down to the swampy Mississippi where he famously slaps a white supremacist across the face. His activism reached far outside of the film industry, as in 1964 he became friends with Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King Jr. and together helped finance the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi area.
Sidney Poitier will forever be remembered as a man who stood for what he believed in, broke away from the norm, and truly marked the path for future generations in the film industry like very few people have done before or since. Oprah Winfrey is currently working with Apple on a documentary on his life and career. Working closely with Poitier’s family, her production company Harpo Productions alongside director Reginald Hudlin’s vision will hopefully give audiences a documentary worthy of a man of Sidney Poitier’s legacy.