Sidney Poitier dies at 94: Looking back at an actor, activist, and agent of change

Sidney Poitier, 94, the actor and activist who rose from illiterate Bahamian street urchin to eloquent Hollywood trailblazer, crashing through racial barriers to become the first Black actor to win a competitive Academy Award, died Thursday night at his hacienda-style home in Los Angeles.

The saga of how an uneducated boy who wore shirts stitched from flour sacks came to dominate the entertainment business — in 1967, Mr. Poitier headlined three of the year’s top-grossing films — is as dramatic as one of his movies. Over a 60-year career that spanned Broadway and Hollywood, the actor evolved from a token America pointed to when it wanted to congratulate itself for racial equality to an inspirational agent of social change.

In 1950, when Mr. Poitier arrived in Hollywood to portray Dr. Luther Brooks in No Way Out, Blacks on screen largely were subsidiary characters — maids, butlers, shuffling stooges and the occasional songbird or tap dancer.

“I always left the theater feeling embarrassment,” the actor recalled the actor in a 2006 Inquirer interview of the stereotypical Black performers he saw on screen in the 1940s. He wanted moviegoers who saw him to feel pride.

He starred not only as physicians but also, indelibly, as priests and policemen.

Those individual parts added up to the actor’s larger role as the man who, along with baseball player Jackie Robinson and jurist Thurgood Marshall, was on the front lines of integrating America’s segregated institutions. Standing on the shoulders of performers Paul Robeson and Lena Horne, who largely were consigned to screen stereotype, Mr. Poitier played unflappable professionals. In so doing he changed the face of American movies — and America itself.

A constant target of white bigotry and, occasionally, Black contempt, Mr. Poitier shouldered clashing racial expectations with characteristic poise, suggesting his own interior conflict in an oceanic voice that crashed and swelled like waves.

In life and on-screen, when tensions heated up, Mr. Poitier kept cool. The late actor Ruby Dee, a friend and colleague from his earliest days as a stage actor, noted his extraordinary ability to control his emotional fires. Keeping that volatility in check exacted an emotional toll.

“I had allies who fought the civil rights struggle,” Mr. Poitier, who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., recalled in 2006 in an interview the Inquirer. “I fought another battle in Hollywood, in an industry I tried to change.”

And did, but not by throwing bombs. By refusing to let the majority culture define him, Mr. Poitier smashed Hollywood racial stereotypes. It took epic patience and perseverance, learned at the feet of his mother, Evelyn, who, in the family’s leanest times, pulverized boulders into gravel for 20 cents a day.

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He was born in Miami on February 20, 1927, the eighth and youngest child of Bahamian farmers who sold their harvest there. Infant Sidney arrived premature, under three pounds and was not expected to live. The midwife sent his father, Reginald, to fetch a casket and he returned with a shoebox.

Evelyn would hear nothing of the midwife’s verdict. She consulted a soothsayer who assured her that the infant would survive and “travel to the corners of the Earth and walk with kings.”

This affirmation gave her the resolve to nurse Sidney to thriving health. He would grow from three pounds to 200, reaching a proud 6-feet-3, a stature that, through diligent exercise and diet, he maintained well into his ninth decade.

The Poitiers returned to Cat Island, a dot in the Bahamas archipelago, where Sidney spent an idyllic youth fishing and swimming. But in 1937 when Florida banned produce from the islands, the family was forced to move, thrusting their youngest, a 10-year-old West Indian Huck Finn, into the street life of urban Nassau.

“That place was not good for raising tomatoes or children,” Mr. Poitier recalled in his 1980 memoir This Life. At 14, he was jailed for stealing corn. To steer him from juvenile delinquency, in 1942 his parents dispatched Sidney, then 15, to Miami, in the care of an elder brother, Cyril.

“I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was ... a human being,” reflected Mr. Poitier. In Miami, startled by the segregated bathroom signs that read “White” and “Colored,” he learned that others did not share his opinion.

Hired as a delivery boy but ignorant of service entrances, he knocked at the front door of a Miami Beach estate to leave a parcel. Arrival via the front door foreshadowed Mr. Poitier’s entry into Hollywood. For his front-door effrontery, members of Miami’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan threatened him with his life.

Shortly after this encounter, he hopped a Greyhound and beelined for Harlem. Unable to afford a hotel room, he returned to Midtown, scouring dishes by day, sleeping by night in Penn Station.

To get a roof over his head and three meals, in 1943 he enlisted in the Army and was assigned to a veteran’s hospital. Sickened by the orderlies’ abuse of shell-shocked GIs, he threw a chair at an officer. An Army psychiatrist was assigned his case, and helped him begin to untangle his knotty feelings about manhood and race.

He felt trapped, he told the doctor, because he lacked education. What he didn’t lack was ambition.

Back in New York, scoping the classifieds for dishwasher work, the semiliterate dischargee found an ad that said: “Actors wanted for American Negro Theater.”

The audition was a disaster. In West Indian singsong, he stuttered and stumbled over lines like a child reading from a primer.

“You can’t read,” snapped director Frederick O’Neal to the youth with dialect of the islands. “Go find work as a dishwasher.”

“I decided then and there to be an actor — just to show him,” Poitier recalled, eyes blazing, in the 2006 Inquirer interview. “Don’t tell me I can’t do something, because then I will certainly do it!”

He bought himself a radio to learn standard American diction. He listened to radio personality Norman Brokenshire on WJZ and emulated his cadences.

“Still, I didn’t have the skills to read street signs,” he remembered. He was tutored by a “Jewish gentleman” who waited tables at the Queens, N.Y., diner where he washed dishes. Lessons in pronunciation and meaning turned him into a voracious reader.

Mr. Poitier’s second ANT audition was “marginally better,” he recalled, although when the aspiring actor was asked to improvise he didn’t know what the word meant. Accepted on a trial basis, he worked as the theater’s janitor. Widely regarded as the least likely to succeed, Mr. Poitier lobbied to understudy a colleague named Harry Belafonte, with whom he would enjoy a fractious rivalry and an intimate, sustaining friendship for more than 60 years.

On a night that Belafonte couldn’t make it, a Broadway director came scouting. Which is how Mr. Poitier came to make his legitimate theater debut in Lysistrata (1946). He followed it with a national tour in Anna Lucasta. Hollywood director Joe Mankiewicz cast him as Dr. Brooks in No Way Out (1950), a professional who steels himself against the race-baiting of bigoted patients he is dedicated to heal.

The theme of the Black professional who, in the face of unrelenting persecution, acquits himself with honor became Mr. Poitier’s specialty — on screen and off.

As his career gained traction he wed Juanita Hardy, a model and cover girl, in 1950. They had four daughters, Beverly, Pamela, Sherri, and Gina.

Despite glowing notices for No Way Out and Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), Mr. Poitier went two years without another significant movie role. Was he stigmatized for his friendship with known radicals Paul Robeson and Canada Lee?

“I couldn’t say that it was the blacklist or my Black face that kept me from working,” he observed in 2006. Although it would have helped him get jobs, the politically liberal Mr. Poitier would not denounce mentors Robeson and Lee.

Filmmaker Richard Brooks fought for Mr. Poitier to play a juvenile delinquent reformed by crusading teacher Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle (1955), where the young actor simultaneously radiated heat and cool. His performance landed him parts in television dramas, including A Man is Ten Feet Tall (1955), about the corruption on the New York waterfront, remade as the 1957 feature film Edge of the City.

Mr. Poitier broke through to stardom in The Defiant Ones (1958), cast opposite Tony Curtis in Stanley Kramer’s allegory about escaped chain gang convicts, fates and feet shackled, who learn to depend upon and respect each other. His role earned him star billing and the first of two Oscar nominations.

But in order to make Defiant Ones, which he liked, he had to commit to making Porgy and Bess, which he did not. For him, the folk opera was crammed with the stereotypes he was trying to bust.

To director Otto Preminger’s frustration, as the Catfish Row cripple besotted with a prostitute (Dorothy Dandridge) Mr. Poitier substituted standard English for the scripted patois. On set, the actor met Diahann Carroll, also married, with whom he would have a turbulent, decadelong extramarital relationship.

Some revolutions are loud, like the civil disobedience of 1967 when from Detroit to Newark, black Americans protested against police brutality and political disenfranchisement. Others are quiet, like Mr. Poitier’s defining — and defiant — commitment to creating three-dimensional Black characters on screen.

If he had failed to do that as Porgy, he succeeded in what is widely regarded as Mr. Poitier’s most complex characterization, his Broadway performance as doomed dreamer Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1961), which he reprised on the screen.

Despite his unprecedented success on stage and screen, Mr. Poitier was a fly in the buttermilk, not considered an actor, but a “Negro actor,” he recalled. It was excruciating, he said, to be the only Black man on the MGM lot besides the shoeshine guy.

In the early 1960s he couldn’t rent a house convenient to a Hollywood studio and had to stay in expensive hotels. He testified before congressional committees about discrimination in Hollywood and on Broadway, noting that on most of his sets he was the only Black. “It’s no great joy to me,” he said, “to be used as an example of how [Hollywood doesn’t] really discriminate.”

On the heels of Raisin, he and Carroll teamed with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward on the underknown Paris Blues (1962), a jazzy nocturne about American expats in Paris, pursuing their music far from America’s social unrest.

Then came his 1963 role in Lilies of the Field as Homer Smith, a cheerful drifter who agrees to build a chapel for immigrant German nuns. It was his first racially nonspecific role and he embraced it like a lover. Uncharacteristically, he played it unsprung rather than tightly-coiled, leading the nuns in the exuberant song, “Amen.” For his work Mr. Poitier was honored with the first of his two Academy Awards.

“It’s been a long journey to this moment,” he said accepting the statuette in 1964. When he left the dais, he saw marks on his palms and realized that he had thrust in his fingernails so deep so “that the pain would halt the emotional turmoil within me.”

“It was bittersweet,” he recalled in the 2006 Inquirer interview. He made history that night in 1964. But the Oscar “didn’t change anything.”

Ever judicious, to a reporter he said, “I don’t believe my Oscar will be a … magic wand that will wipe away the restrictions on job opportunities for Negro actors.” To himself he privately raged: “I’m never going to put myself through this s— no more.” Only he knew how heavy weighed the burden of representing an entire race.

And though he had two movies in the can, the morning after his Oscar, the Academy’s best actor did not have a job. That would change. But it also made the burden even heavier. For every time he spoke out against prejudice — as in 1964, when he and Belafonte traveled to Mississippi after the murder of three civil rights workers — the Ku Klux Klan dogged his steps.

In 1967, Mr. Poitier hit the trifecta with To Sir With Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

In Sir, as idealistic teacher Mark Thackeray, he disciplines and charms the vinegar out of Cockney roughnecks.

Guess has him as idealistic Dr. John Prentice, a humanitarian paragon engaged to the daughter of limousine liberals Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who disapprove of the union as do his own parents. When Prentice argues with his father, saying “Dad, you think of yourself as a colored man, I think of myself as a man,” he may have been speaking more to white America than for Black America. (Of Poitier’s performance, black activist H. Rap Brown quipped, “Even [white bigot] George Wallace would love that (expletive)”)

As In the Heat’s Virgil Tibbs, an impatient Philadelphia detective who builds an unlikely bond with bigoted Southern sheriff Rod Steiger, Poitier does the best work of his career. It was one of the rare occasions the actor tapped into his volatility, especially in the scene where a white racist slaps Virgil, who slaps back in kind.

Mr. Poitier wrote the story that became the basis of the delightful 1968 comedy, For the Love of Ivy, one of the few films in which he has a libido and is lovably imperfect.

After the 1968 Academy Awards, rescheduled due to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Poitier was the top box office star in America. But at the pinnacle of his career, he could no longer bear the responsibility of representing all Black people, all the time. At a historic moment when Blacks were politically divided between the nonviolence of the civil rights era and the violence of Black Power protests, he was attacked both by white liberals and Black activists.

Perhaps in response to his critics, in 1968 Mr. Poitier took a role in The Lost Man as a Black revolutionary who defaults to crime. On the set of the film shot in Philadelphia he met costar Joanna Shimkus, whom he married in 1976 and with whom he had daughters Anika and Sydney.

Mr. Poitier swam the cultural riptide, making films expressly appealing to Black audiences, such as Buck and the Preacher (1972), a lighthearted Western that marked his directorial debut. His role as a Civil War-era wagonmaster opposite Belafonte’s rascally pastor reunited the friends who had fallen out in the wake of the King assassination. They followed up their success in the Poitier-directed Uptown Saturday Night (1974), an all-star, family-friendly period comedy far from the violence of Shaft and Superfly.

While Mr. Poitier didn’t personally make blaxploitation films, he said in the 2006 interview he enjoyed “the Black guys beating up the white guys for a change.” Even more than that, he enjoyed watching other Black actors on screen.

The actor/director’s other 1970s directorial efforts included Let’s Do It Again (1975) and A Piece of the Action (1977), effectively the bridge between blaxploitation pictures and the Black film renaissance of Spike Lee and John Singleton. He took a vacation from acting to write This Life (1980), the first of his three books. Afterward, Mr. Poitier directed the sensationally entertaining Stir Crazy (also 1980), with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.

He made distinguished performances in the television dramas Separate But Equal (1991, summoning his considerable powers to play Thurgood Marshall) and Mandela and de Klerk (1996), using his restrained eloquence to channel Nelson Mandela.

A generation after being dismissed as a token by some observers, Mr. Poitier was widely, and deservedly, hailed as a courageous cultural pioneer. He literally had to build an addition to his art-filled Beverly Hills home to house his numerous awards. Among them were two Oscars, the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award (1992), the Kennedy Center honors (1995), the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement (1999), the Marian Anderson Award (2006), a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, the Bahamian ambassadorship to Japan, and the Congressional Medal of Freedom (2009). “It has been said that Sidney Poitier does not make movies,” President Obama said, hanging the medal on Mr. Poitier, “He makes milestones.... Milestones of American progress.”

By 2002, when he accepted a lifetime achievement Oscar and saw both Denzel Washington and Halle Berry win Academy Awards on the same night, Mr. Poitier reaped the rewards of what he had sown. In 2006, he laughed heartily when a reporter summed up the history of Blacks on screen in three sentences:

Sidney Poitier disdains Hollywood’s service entrance and enters through the front door. Thirty years later, Denzel Washington demands a place at the table. Twenty years after that, Will Smith assumes his place at the head.

“Not a bad epitaph,” approved Mr. Poitier with a nod.

Mr. Poitier is survived by his wife, Joanna Shimkus, and five of his six daughters. His daughter Gina died in 2008.

Carrie Rickey is the former Inquirer film critic.