Sidney Poitier is Hollywood's first major black film star whose popularity crossed racial boundaries. Tall and good-looking, Sidney Poitier presented 1950s and 1960s film audiences with a new view of black people, often portraying professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers. In a career spanning 50-plus years, he has become not only a highly respected and bankable actor, but also an extremely successful actor-director with a string of hit films to his credit.
Born in Florida to Bahamian parents, young Sidney Poitier and his family returned to Cat Island in the Bahamas and he was raised there. His formal education consisted of a year and a half of schooling. After serving in the army, he moved to New York and worked at a series of odd jobs before joining the American Negro Theater, where he received his early training. His first public performance was in an all-black version of Aristophanes's Lysistrata (1946). He had only a dozen lines, but on opening night he blew them. Ironically, the critics applauded his jumbled delivery of his lines while panning the rest of the production. His career was launched.
Sidney Poitier continued to act on the stage and was soon offered the opportunity to play a doctor in one of Hollywood's earliest studio-financed antiracist films, No Way Out (1950). It was not his first film appearance, however. He was in a U.S. Army documentary called From Whom Cometh My Help (1949). Good roles for black actors have always been hard to come by, but Sidney Poitier was Hollywood's choice for virtually all of them in the 1950s. Unfortunately, even an actor of Sidney Poitier's growing reputation was cast only in films about bigotry.
It rarely occurred to casting directors that he might star in a film that had nothing to do with race. Nonetheless, he played an important role in changing America's stereotyped views of blacks with movies such as Cry, The Beloved Country (1952), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), and The Defiant Ones (1958). For his performance in the last, he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
He won the Oscar five years later for his performance in Lilies of the Field (1963), but the 1960s didn't differ much from the 1950s with regard to the kinds of roles he played. Movies such as A Raisin in the Sun (1961), Pressure Point (1962), and A Patch of Blue (1965) dealt with the issue of racism in America. There were, happily, a few exceptions, such as his roles in A Slender Thread (1966) and the sleeper hit of 1967, To Sir with Love.
When STANLEY KRAMER decided to make the controversial film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967), a movie about an interracial couple, Sidney Poitier was, again, the obvious casting choice for the male lead. The film was a media event and a box-office success, and along with To Sir with Love and a third hit in that same year, In the Heat of the Night (1967), the actor had finally become a Hollywood superstar.
Sidney Poitier continued to be active throughout the 1990s, appearing in some television shows and in films. In Separate but Equal (1991), made for TV, he played NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall in the story of Brown v. the Board of Education; later (1997), he played Nelson Mandela in a cable docudrama, Mandela and De Klerk, for which he received an Emmy nomination; and in 2001 he played the title role in Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey. His feature films during this period include Sneakers (1992), about computer hackers, and The Jackal (1997), in which, as an FBI agent, he hires RICHARD GERE to track down villain BRUCE WILLIS.
In recognition of his work, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. In the political arena, he has served as the Bahamas's ambassador to Japan. More recently Sidney Poitier has made political- and African–Americanthemed films mainly for cable and television markets, notably Scandalize My Name: Stories from the Blacklist (1998), League of Legends (1998), Free of Eden (1999), The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn (1999), and Last Brickmaker in America (2001).
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