Sidney Poitier’s Real Breakthrough Role Was as Hollywood’s First Black Leading Man

Sir Sidney Poitier, Bahamian-American actor and director, has died aged 94, Bahamian government confirmed on Friday.

Poitier was the first black person to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the field in 1963.

Baby boomers have come of age to see Poitier on screen, and each seems to have their own Sidney.

In the blockbuster trilogy of 1967—To Thee with love, in the bright light of the night, and Guess who’s going to join me—I saw the man I wanted to be, even if I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking at. It’s like watching a mystery unfold within a mystery, a display of dazzling presence but marked by unmistakable self-consciousness. My Sidney comes at the sweet time of a halcyon decade ushering in a new age of mass media.

“Sidney Poitier doesn’t make movies, he creates milestones,” New York Times critic Vincent Canby would write as the decade ended, categorizing a group of works that pre-defined and subsequently personified the civil rights movement as “a breakdown of time”. Half a century later, those performances seem to have become the more unconventional fourth wall, Poitier’s “I-not-sure-how-I-see-all of this” reflects Poitier shows an audience watching a man watching his history unfold.

While filming Guess who’s going to join me, in which he played a doctor who marries the daughter of white socialists, the Supreme Court has overturned ancient state rights laws that forbid interracial marriage. In one Time two months later, on the cover of a young newlyweds magazine, the groom, Guy Smith, had Poitier’s “I-not-sure-how-I-see” look, although the movie is not out yet. A speech by Poitier’s on-screen handmaiden in the film sparked a dark backlash that would soon lead him to reduce him to a cultural stereotype. “You’re not fooling me for a minute,” she told him. “I understand what you are. You are one of those smooth talking smart guys n —- ready for all you can get with your black power and all the other troublesome nonsense. ”

It’s not easy to be ugly and premature. Whoever your Sidney is, Poitier has passed away mark a career marked by first. With a quiet grace no different from his contemporaries Jackie Robinson and Harry Belafonte, he broke the color boundaries of Hollywood in 1950 starring as a doctor in a poor part of town in No way out. First of more lines he will pass, Poitier will become the first Black actor:

• Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for 1958 The Defiant Ones.
• won the award (Lilies of the field in 1963). He will still be only The black actor received that award until Denzel Washington in 2002.
• became the highest-grossing lead actor ($165 million worldwide in 1967), that same year and commanded $1 million per film (unheard of but for Marlon Brando) and used That power to “green light” another movie that hasn’t been made. Defer most of your compensation for Send him with love With the unprecedented “consequences” of gross profit, Poitier allowed a film to be shot for $700,000 to gross $85 million worldwide, paving the way for “low-budget blockbusters,” often credited supposed to start a year later with Night of the dead.
• become a “franchise” movie star (In the heat of the night, creating two sequels) and (but for Gordon Parks with Axis) director of the year 1974 Uptown Saturday Night, also spawned two sequels.
• directing a movie grossed over $100 million (1980s stir crazy), a feat not repeated by a single black American until the 21st century.
• knighted by the British crown.
• awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States.
• giving an interracial kiss on screen (1965 A patch of blue), and
• a studio’s off-screen challenge, with In the heat of the night.

That defiance provides the true measure of a man. Though it would prove his signature role, Poitier refused to play a Northern detective helping the Mississippi sheriff solve a local murder unless the film was shot in the North. He also emphasized that a scene in which he was taken over by the Ku Klux Klansman, the plantation owner, would be altered. “I’m going to slap him back,” he informed United Artists, the movie “playing nowhere in the world, with me standing there taking the slap from the man.” The film’s most powerful moment, which helped lead it to the 1967 Best Picture Oscar, was the only scene where South was shot down: Poitier relented at director Norman Jewison’s pleas and spent three nights shooting with a gun under his pillow at a Holiday Inn, the only hotel that accepts black guests.

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But more tellingly, that challenge remained unknown for decades, in which Poitier, a reluctant interviewer, deflected questions about color: “I want people to feel when they leave the theater. sing that life and people are worth it. That is my sole philosophy about the photos that I do. “Even then, his reasons come either productively or grudgingly. In 1964, he and Belafonte secretly flew to Mississippi after the murder of civil rights workers Schwerner-Cheney-Goodman (with $70,000 to fund the movement) and was evicted from the airport by armed Klansmen, narrowly narrowing down almost escaped with his own life.

Recounting it in a 2012 documentary, Belafonte recalled Poitier’s signature line after their escape: “Never call me again.” (Read on: We’re going to the impact of an earlier act of charity / Black Empowerment, when Poitier, Belafonte, and Jackie Robinson founded the African American Student Association, which funded college tuition for Africans from 1959-1963.)

Poitier deflected the importance of responding to Klansman’s on-screen hit when asked about it in a 2013 interview: “I would insult every Black person in the world.” [had he not]. At the time, however, many felt the first weaponized motion at the end of those five fingers: “The slap reverberated throughout the world,” Jewison later called it.

Not everyone sees it that way. The political and racial turbulence of the times would put his performance of Black Man at a turning point, marking a downward spiral in his acting career and the decade that followed. for the camera as much as on the screen. A in 1967 New York Times op-ed, “Why do white Americans love Sidney Poitier so much?” labeled him a “showroom n —- r” and coined the phrase “Sidney Poitier Syndrome” for a conundrum that very Successful black Americans will range from Nat King Cole to Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby (who became a movie star under Poitier’s direction in the 1970s) to Will Smith, who graduated in television and stage to become a movie star in 1993 Six different levels.

And there’s plenty of irony here, as Smith plays a young con man who befriends an Upper East Side family as their Ivy League kids’ supposed schoolmate, and the son of … Sidney Poitier. The highlight of the film is his monologue recounting Poitier’s rise from poverty in the Bahamas with his film, until his hosts exclaim: “Guess who’s going to join meOften cited at the top of the reasons White Americans love Sidney Poitier so his stereotype of adaptation is personified by a saying, if ironic, addressed to his wife. : “Each of our children will be the president of the United States.” Smith will become next highest grossing black American actor of 2007, 14 years later and 40 after Poitier.

That year, as fate intended, saw the arrival of Poitier The Measure of a Man: An Autobiography of the Spirit, in which the harsh measures he went through on his harrowing path from the Bahamas through his filmography were eventually recorded in the annals. Rather than recur, I advise readers to go on that journey, if not for its awe-inspiring power to endure it, then lie to Canby 40 years later. For Poitier, Poitier’s roles were by no means defining, or constituting a “temporal randomness”. They are the choices of a man trying to find his way when history has not yet hit the screen, choices he is initially hailed as the first to make, then feels uncomfortable again. . Like a savant opines in the movie Jonah, Who will be 25 years old in 2000:”[W]Hy is a prophet is no honor in his country? Because prophets exist between the ages… The holes created by oracles to see into the future are the same holes through which historians will see monuments to the past. “.

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And indeed, 2008 saw a veritable historical monument: the ascension of another American gentleman who spent his childhood abroad, whose parents met for half a century. earlier in Hawaii, where his Kenyan father may have never attended college but on a sponsored scholarship. by Poitier et al.

“Every Negro is a Thurgood Marshall or a Sidney Poitier,” President Barack Obama would later write of his own childhood, the last of the baby boomers growing up to be seen. his Sidney Poitier on the big screen. Like both the actor and his doctor character, this future Ivy Leaguer will have a color incarnation of his criticized, by his own colors as well as a man’s face. some orange.

Still, he doubted himself, or, if so, could bear it with the strength and silent grace of his spiritual forebears. His Sidney Poitier showed him that “to be Negro is to be the heir to a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we can bear.”