Role model
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The first black actor to receive an Oscar for “the Lily of the Fields” in 1964, and a civil rights activist, the American-Bahamian actor paved the way for a whole generation of African-American comedians. He died Friday at the age of 94.
In 1968, the magazine Variety proclaimed that Sidney Poitier “Was the greatest actor of the year, white or black”. The consecration for the one who was the first black American star, who died Thursday at the age of 94. For boomers, Poitier is this charismatic dark prince, graceful, warm, proud, always sensitive, tough sometimes without being overtly threatening. A model therefore, because without him there would be no (at random) Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker or Jamie Foxx in Hollywood. A historically important figure whose career paralleled the upheavals of the struggle for civil rights, without necessarily having played in masterpieces. Poitier will, in spite of himself, be the bearer of an insoluble equation, at the time and still today: to be an African-American of which his community could be proud because he succeeded, without scaring white America.
Poitier was born by chance in Miami to Bahamian farmer parents who had come there to sell vegetables – a happy accident which earned him de facto American nationality and which enabled him to emigrate without problem to Florida at the age of 15 and then to multiply odd jobs in New York. A diver in a restaurant, he learns to decipher English by reading the newspapers every evening with a waiter and erases his Bahamian accent by imitating the announcers on the radio. He enlisted in the army during the Second World War and was assigned to a veterans’ hospital where he had to take care of psychiatric patients …