Sometimes a movie star is more than just an actor.
During the golden age of Hollywood, and for quite a while thereafter, the greatest stars didn’t so much perform as reveal aspects of their souls: the nimble grace of Cary Grant, the untutored manliness of John Wayne, the intoxicating sultriness of Sophia Loren.
Sidney Poitier, who died on Jan. 6 at the age of 94, was every bit in their class. Whether cast as a prison escapee in The Defiant Ones (1958) or a dutiful teacher in To Sir, With Love (1967), Poitier exuded a kind of majestic authority that held sway with audiences for generations. In addition to his civil rights activism and participation in numerous socially conscious pictures, his baritone alone could snap one to attention: “They call me Mister Tibbs!” was his rightly famous line from In the Heat of the Night (1967).
His story suggests the promise of America to those who live near its shores: Although his parents, Evelyn and Reginald Poitier, were residents of Cat Island in the Bahamas, Sidney, the youngest of their seven children, was born in Miami, Florida, where his parents were then visiting and to which Sidney returned as a teenager.
An instinct for self-improvement seems to have been with him from the start. When he was 16, Poitier, whose education ended at 12, picked up stakes and moved to New York. “I had absolutely no interest at all in being an actor,” Poitier said in a 2014 interview. “I was, at that point, content to be a dishwasher, because I felt and understood and embraced the fact that I did not have the wherewithal to do much else.”
Simultaneously, he was readying himself for brighter days by improving his reading ability. Paging through an African American newspaper one day, Poitier’s eye caught an ad for the American Negro Theatre, where he failed at his first audition but, with persistence, further study, and a willingness to be a janitor for the troupe on the side, he eventually caught on.
Where Poitier’s life had once taken him north, soon he was steered west by the entreaties of Hollywood. In short order, Poitier found himself appearing in a series of important films, none more so than Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film noir No Way Out (1950), starring Poitier as a physician treating, and contending with, a prejudiced patient (Richard Widmark). Supporting parts in Zoltan Korda’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), Richard Brooks’s Blackboard Jungle (1955), and Raoul Walsh’s Band of Angels (1957) were the opening act to the stardom that followed.
After co-starring with Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, a performance that led to Poitier becoming the first black actor to be recognized with an Oscar nomination for best actor, Poitier became one of the most popular and admired stars of the age, a responsibility not for a moment lost on him. “I felt very much as if I were representing 16, 18 million people with every movie I made,” he wrote in his memoir.
Revisited today, many of Poitier’s best-known films, especially Lilies of the Field (1963), for which he won best actor, and A Patch of Blue (1965), have the musty air of midcentury liberalism, but Poitier is never anything but vibrant, alive, and committed on screen. After 50 years, In the Heat of the Night, about police department racism, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), about interracial marriage, are inevitably less timely than they once were, but Poitier’s unyielding but graceful presence still provides ample reasons to revisit them.
His commitment to social causes notwithstanding, Poitier gravitated toward pure entertainment when he began directing in the 1970s. The Poitier-directed Western Buck and the Preacher (1972) and a series of comedies he made with Bill Cosby, including Uptown Saturday Night (1974) remain fun, ingratiating entertainments, as does Stir Crazy, one of the best Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedies.
Over time, Poitier went from trailblazer to eminence: After a decadelong sabbatical from screen appearances, Poitier reemerged having acquired the sort of stateliness that only age can confer. He was an FBI agent in Little Nikita (1988) and the most imposing among a motley group of computer hackers in Sneakers (1992) — about the latter film, Peter Bogdanovich, who directed him in a fine made-for-TV sequel To Sir, With Love II (1996), wrote that Poitier “looked more like a leading man than co-star Robert Redford.”
Above all, Poitier’s career is a picture of constancy. He never starred in a movie unworthy of his gifts or unbecoming of his ideals. Fittingly, his last appearances in the public eye tended to be occasions such as when he received an honorary Oscar in 2002 or a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
Like the great movie stars who came before him, Poitier was always true to himself — one reason audiences, to this day, have stayed true to him.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the American Conservative.
