Movie Icons: Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier

Sir Sidney Poitier, the first black man to win a best actor Oscar, died on 6th January 2022 at his home in Los Angeles.
Poitier made history by winning the Academy Award for best actor in 1964 for his role in Lilies of the Field.
Barack Obama, who awarded Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his first term, tweeted: “Through his groundbreaking roles and singular talent, Sidney Poitier epitomised dignity and grace, revealing the power of movies to bring us closer together.”

Obituary

It is hard today to comprehend fully the hurdles that faced Sidney Poitier at the start of his acting career. Resistance came not just from some sections of American society – when he emerged into the public eye, segregation was still prevalent in the southern states – and from a Hollywood establishment that had hidebound ideas about the kind of role that an African-American could play. He also encountered a backlash from some sections of the black community, which criticised him for being insufficiently radical and for habitually favouring roles that were non-threatening to a white audience.
Poitier nevertheless became the first bona fide African-American movie star, and not only that but the first black performer to win an Oscar for best actor in a leading role. He paved the way for a whole generation of actors, directors and writers of African-American descent and other minority groups.
Poitier’s career travails were only the latest battle in a life that, from the very beginning, was a struggle. When he was born in 1927 in Miami, during a visit by his Bahamian parents to the US, he was two months premature and weighed just 3lb. He wasn’t expected to survive. Resigned, his father found a shoebox in which to bury his tiny, fragile son. Yet against the odds, the child pulled through and spent the first years of his life in extreme poverty, his father eking a dirt-poor existence on the family farm on Cat Island in the Bahamas. His mother supplemented the meagre living they made from growing tomatoes by breaking rocks into gravel for the construction industry.
When Sidney was ten he moved with his family to Nassau; at 15 he was sent to live with his brother in Miami. Two years later he found himself sleeping rough in New York. He was briefly jailed for vagrancy and later recalled getting shot in the leg during a race riot – he avoided arrest by eschewing the hospital and treating the wound himself. He bore the scar throughout his long life.
With little formal schooling, Poitier drifted between menial jobs in construction, cleaning and working as a dishwasher. He improved his reading with the help of a waiter who sat with him after hours in the diner where they both worked. Having been thrown out of his first acting audition by a director who took issue with his accent, Poitier purchased a cheap radio and shed his Bahamian lilt by mimicking the announcers’ precise diction while he toiled over the washing-up in a restaurant kitchen.
His introduction to acting came in 1945 at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem. The limitations in Poitier’s abilities – he was tone deaf – worked in his favour. Rather than follow the song and dance entertainer route, he concentrated on his acting. His efforts were rewarded with a starring role in a Broadway production of Lysistrata. His first film role, playing a doctor in Darryl F Zanuck’s No Way Out, came in 1950. That year Poitier married his first wife, the former dancer Juanita Hardy.
Poitier’s breakout role came in 1955, playing a rebellious but promising student in Richard Brooks’s searing social commentary picture Blackboard Jungle. Capitalising on the profile that the film brought him, Poitier relocated with his family to Los Angeles. Notable roles included Edge of the City (1957), in which he played a docker opposite John Cassavetes, and The Defiant Ones (1958), co-starring with Tony Curtis in the story of two escaped convicts chained together. This latter picture earned Poitier his first Academy Award nomination, the first nomination for any African-American male actor. Five years later he won the Oscar for best actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), a rather saccharine drama that was notable for the fact that it was the first film in which his race was incidental, but not much else.
The year 1967 was pivotal, with Poitier starring in three of its most commercially successful films: To Sir With Love; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. Of the three, it is the latter, a crime drama in which Poitier played the detective Virgil Tibbs and Rod Steiger co-starred as a racist police chief, that is now considered to be a classic. The film spawned two sequels, They Call Me Mr Tibbs! (1970) and The Organization (1971). Steiger said of it at the time: “The races, in cinema as much as in real life, didn’t mix. In the Heat of the Night wasn’t just risky cinema: it was a revolution. Suddenly police brutality, government crackdowns, the civil rights movement – they were all thrown into the American consciousness. Hell, the south hated the film so much, it was banned there.”
Although the film was set in Mississippi, Poitier had been threatened by the Ku Klux Klan there during a previous visit, and insisted that it was filmed in the north. Illinois doubled for the south in all but a few scenes. However, the production was forced to shoot in Tennessee briefly. Poitier slept with a gun under his pillow throughout, and the location shoot was cut short after local racists made death threats.
From the outset Poitier was careful about the kind of roles he accepted. The filmmaker Robert Townsend recalled: “If he had played just one pimp, there would have been no In the Heat of the Night.” As the only African-American lead actor he felt that it was his responsibility to challenge the orthodoxy and to stand up against the stereotypes that cinema perpetrated. At times the responsibility of being the lone black actor weighed heavily. “The pressure of that circumstance was excruciating,” he later recalled. “When you are carrying everybody’s dream, all the minority people.”
With the advent of the civil rights movement Poitier and his morally unimpeachable “whiter than white” onscreen persona increasingly became the target of criticism from the black community. He was described as an “Uncle Tom”, a damning indictment that cut deeply and contributed to Poitier moving away from acting and focusing on directing, with his notable films including the 1980 comedy Stir Crazy starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.
Pressure from the backlash against him and guilt over the break-up of his first marriage led to Poitier spending most of his Hollywood years in therapy. His marriage to Juanita, who later became a mosaic artist, unravelled in 1965 over his affair with the actress Diahann Carroll.
He met Carroll on the set of Porgy and Bess (1959), and later said, “We had not been on the set . . . more than a few days when I realised that she was unique. She had fantastic cheekbones, perfect teeth and dark, mysterious eyes. She was confident, inviting, sensuous, and she moved with a rhythm that absolutely tantalised me . . . I acted very, very gentlemanly for weeks, but halfway through the picture we fell in love.” He told Juanita about the affair straight away, but it took a further six years before the marriage ended.
Coming, as he did, from an era that celebrated gentlemanly propriety (“My father had thoroughly indoctrinated me when I was young,” he later recalled), Poitier found the failure of his marriage particularly hard to reconcile. His relationships with his four daughters were tested. “I think there was a time when they were as mad as hell at me because of the threat to their own security. Although I never severed links with them, I was a villain of sorts in their eyes.”
Poitier rebuilt bridges between himself and his children, and at least two of them, Pamela and Sherri, followed their father into the family business. Pamela acted in The Jackal and Stir Crazy. Sherri appeared in her father’s film, A Piece of the Action (1977). Of the other two daughters, Beverly is a jewellery designer and Gina predeceased him in 2018.
Poitier’s next marriage, to the Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus, came in 1976. They met when they co-starred in The Lost Man (1969). They had two daughters, Anika, who dabbled in acting before choosing to direct, and Sydney Tamiia, an actress who has worked with Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood.
In addition to his film career Poitier also worked in the diplomatic service. In 1997 he was appointed ambassador of the Bahamas to Japan, a position he held for ten years. He also concurrently served as the ambassador of the Bahamas to Unesco.
Although Poitier was vocal about his reservations regarding the film industry and the dip in quality of the films produced, his contribution was acknowledged through numerous awards and accolades including an honorary knighthood in 1974 and an honorary Oscar in 2002, awarded “for his extraordinary performances and unique presence on the screen and for representing the industry with dignity, style and intelligence.”
In 2009 he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.

Courtesy of thetimes.co.uk

Key Film

In the Heat of the Night
The film is a 1967 American mystery drama film directed by Norman Jewison. It is based on John Ball’s 1965 novel of the same name and tells the story of Virgil Tibbs, a Black police detective from Philadelphia, who becomes involved in a murder investigation in a small town in Mississippi. It stars Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, and was produced by Walter Mirisch. The screenplay was written by Stirling Silliphant.
The film won five Academy Awards, including the 1967 awards for Best Picture and Rod Steiger for Best Actor.
Passing through the backwoods town of Sparta, Mississippi, Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) becomes embroiled in a murder case. He forms an uneasy alliance with the bigoted police chief (Steiger), who faces mounting pressure from Sparta’s hostile citizens to catch the killer and run the African American interloper out of town.
Director Norman Jewison splices incisive social commentary into this thrilling police procedural with the help of Haskell Wexler’s vivid cinematography, Quincy Jones’s eclectic score, and two indelible lead performances – a career-defining display of seething indignation and moral authority from Poitier and an Oscar-winning master class in Method acting from Steiger. Winner of five Academy Awards, including for best picture, In the Heat of the Night is one of the most enduring Hollywood films of the civil rights era.
In contrast to films like The Chase and Hurry Sundown, which offered confused visions of the South, In the Heat of the Night depicted a tough, edgy vision of a Southern town that seemed to hate outsiders more than itself, a theme reflecting the uncertain mood of the time, just as the civil rights movement attempted to take hold. Canadian director Jewison wanted to tell an anti-racist story of a white man and a black man working together in spite of difficulties. Jewison said that this film proved a conviction he had held for a long time: “It’s you against the world. It’s like going to war. Everybody is trying to tell you something different and they are always putting obstacles in your way.”
A particularly famous line in the film comes immediately after Gillespie mocks the name “Virgil”:
Gillespie: “That’s a funny name for a nigger boy that comes from Philadelphia! What do they call you up there?”
(An annoyed) Tibbs: “They call me Mister Tibbs!”
This reply was later listed as number 16 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes, a list of top film quotes, and was also the title of the movie’s sequel.
Another important scene that surprised and shocked audiences at the time occurs when Tibbs is slapped by white plantation owner Endicott. Tibbs responds by immediately slapping him back. In a San Francisco pre-screening, Jewison was concerned when the young audience was laughing at the film as if it were a comedy. The audience’s stunned reaction to the slapping scene convinced Jewison that the film was effective as drama. That scene helped make the film so popular for audiences, finally seeing the top black film actor physically strike back against bigotry, that the film earned the nickname, Superspade Versus the Rednecks. During the film’s initial run, Steiger and Poitier occasionally went to the Capitol Theatre in New York to amuse themselves seeing how many black and white audience members there were, which could be immediately ascertained by listening to the former cheering Tibbs’s retaliatory slap and the latter whispering “Oh!” in astonishment.

Source: criterion.com & en.wikipedia.com

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