In his own words, the actor found hardly any footsteps to follow. The Oscar winner himself laid the groundwork for many successors, from Denzel Washington to Idris Elba.
Sidney Poitier at an Oscar party in Hollywood in 2014.
The posture at issue here cannot be trained with any back exercises. She stands for inner values, for a combination of strength, class and nobility, for which Sidney Poitier stood like few in film history.
This fascinating aura and dignity was also palpable when the 75-year-old actor and multiple grandfather received the Oscar for his life’s work in Los Angeles in 2002. The farmer’s son from the Bahamas, with his still beautiful and sharp facial features and slightly grayed and thinned hair, accepted the standing ovation in the hall. And in a firm voice that wasn’t quite as silky as it used to be, he turned the wheel of time back to the point where he’d arrived in Hollywood at the age of 22.
Subscribed to leading roles
“Here I am at the end of a road that in 1949 was considered to be almost impossible,” Poitier recalled. “There was no lead in which I could go,” he said, who then himself paved the way for future stars like Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker. He thanked the “handful of visionary filmmakers” who not only made his career possible at the time and who, against all odds, led the cinema into a new era: “The film industry benefited from their efforts, as did America and in many ways the whole world.”
In times when African-American actors were given supporting roles at best, and this mostly in a clichéd environment, the dazzling-looking young man and his class became the first dark-skinned film star in Hollywood and was soon subscribed to leading roles. Nine years after his screen debut in “No Way Out” as an assistant doctor who was exposed to racist hostility, he was nominated for the first Oscar in 1959: In “The Defiant Ones” he escapes as a black prisoner with a white fellow prisoner chained to him (Tony Curtis).
Five years later he actually won the Oscar, and indeed as the first African American ever in the category of best leading actor: for his performance in Ralph Nelson’s comedy “Lilies of the Field” he received the coveted statuette in 1964 from the hands of Anne Bancroft. He then became an icon in his prime role as police detective Virgil Tibbs, namely in his first mission: “In the Heat of the Night” (1967) directed by Norman Jewison and with the theme song by Ray Charles.
The fictional character conceived by John Ball was specially adapted for him. As Mr. Perfect, determined, self-confident, with integrity and in a suit more completely peeled off the egg than James Bond, he lets the local police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) overcome racist prejudices or at least question them while solving a murder case in the southern states. At Poitier’s request, however, the film was largely shot in the north: he and his long-time friend and colleague Harry Belafonte had barely survived an attack by the Ku Klux Klan a few years earlier while supporting civil rights activists in Mississippi.
Sidney Poitiers thanks for the honorary Oscar 2002.
Poitier’s parents came from the Bahamas, then part of the British colonies, but were visiting Miami when Sidney was born on February 20, 1927. He was a citizen of America from his very first minute, where he came to live with his brother as a teenager in the Bahamas after his childhood. At the age of 18 he moved to New York, where he initially kept himself afloat as a homeless person doing odd jobs and was just washing dishes when he auditioned at the American Negro Theater in Harlem to gain his first stage experience. His acting talent soon brought him to Broadway, and a few years later he made the leap to Hollywood.
The plots of his films mostly reflected the diverse forms of racism in the United States, from which he could hardly break away. 1967 became a key year for his career when he starred in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “To Sir, with Love” as well as in “In the Heat of the Night”. All three films caused a sensation and set milestones in overcoming the barriers between blacks and whites.
In the more radical circles of the civil rights movement, in which he was involved, Poitier soon fell out of favor: They did not like to see him as the standard bearer of the idea of a harmonious coexistence of white and black, and they also disliked his choice of roles on the screen: he primarily embodied more sedate people Figures and authority figures such as doctors, teachers, pastors, police officers, that is, ideal types of the white middle class.
Ambassador of the Bahamas
Since other roles were soon in demand in the cinema, too, Poitier shifted more and more to directing. His career in front of the camera flared up again in the nineties: he played with Robert Redford in “Sneakers” (1992), and in the action thriller “The Jackal” (1997) he had his last screen appearance alongside Bruce Willis and Richard Gere . In the same year he took up the post of ambassador of the Bahamas to Japan, whose representative functions he was to hold for ten years. So also at the time when he received the honorary Oscar in 2002.
Sidney Poitier died this Thursday at the age of 94. Fred Mitchell, the Bahamas’ foreign minister, announced this the next day, and Poitier was undoubtedly one of their most famous sons.