Sidney Poitier: The Lonely Leader
Sidney Poitier. Photograph: Bob Adelman/AP
Interviewer: You were here in search of fame and fortune.
Poitier: I was here in search.
The 2022 documentary ‘Sidney’, directed by Reginald Hudlin, tells the story of Sidney Poitier, actor, film director and activist.
‘I never thought about what I looked like. I would only see what I was.’
Curious to learn, determined to succeed, resolute in the face of bigotry, Poitier played a succession of compelling film roles in the 1950s and ‘60s, that forged a path for Black actors in the decades that followed. As a Hollywood pioneer, he had to navigate without maps, to plot his own route through the political and social dilemmas of the time. He prompts us to reflect on the loneliness of leadership and the enduring role of values in decision making.
‘I am artist, man, American, contemporary. I am an awful lot of things. So I wish you would pay me the respect due.’
Born in 1927, in Miami, Florida, the youngest of seven children, Poitier was raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas, where his father was a tomato farmer.
‘The world I knew was quite simple. I didn’t know there was such a thing as electricity. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as having water come into the house in a pipe. I learned by observation what the world was like. I saw creatures, I saw birds and I had to figure out for myself what they were.’
When Poitier was 10 years-old, his family moved to Nassau, where he saw his first car, mirror and movie. He fell in with some rough kids, and so was sent to Miami to live with his brother's family. It was here, aged 15, that he had his first experience of racism.
‘From the time I got off the boat, Florida began to say to me: you’re not who you think you are.’
After run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan and the local police, Poitier realised he had to get out of town.
‘Within a matter of a few months, I had to kind of switch my whole view of life. I began to learn who had the power, and I would witness the application of that power.’
Still from The Defiant Ones - Sidney Potier and Tony Curtis
Arriving in New York, Poitier slept in a toilet cubical at the bus station and found a job washing dishes. Having seen an ad in the paper, he applied for a role as an actor at the American Negro Theatre, where he was auditioned by the founder Frederick O’Neal.
‘He said: ‘Why don’t you stop wasting people’s time and go get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something?’ That’s the moment I became an actor.’
Poitier’s mind was made up. Every night an elderly Jewish waiter at the bar-and-grill where he was working helped him to improve his reading with the aid of a newspaper. And he studied the radio broadcaster Norman Brokenshire in order to remodel his Bahamian accent.
‘I was born with a curiosity that got me into an awful lot of trouble when I was a kid, but it certainly stood me in good stead when I became an adult. I hope that curiosity stays with me all my life.’
At length, Poitier was admitted to the American Negro Theater, where he was spotted by a producer and given a leading role in a Broadway play. This in turn led to him being scouted by 20th Century Fox, who offered him a screen test in Hollywood.
‘Acting offered me an area where I could be an exhibitionist, where I could give vent to some of my frustrations, where I could pour out some of my confusion and other ills into a fictitious character. I thought: this is something that gives me a badge of distinction. I can be many things here. And the areas of life – socially and otherwise – that were restricted to me, I had ways of retaliating in this kind of illusion.’
The Poster for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
In Poitier’s first major role, ‘No Way Out’ (1950), he played a young doctor in an LA hospital tending to a white bigot. The part broke with the film convention of characterising Black people as funny, lazy or stupid.
‘There were people in the industry who didn’t have the courage to make a film like that about Black people. There was a habit pattern of utilising Blacks in the most disrespectful way.’
Despite his breakthrough, Poitier soon found himself back in New York washing dishes.
‘I still had faith in myself and faith in the future.’
Poitier was not prepared to take any role. He turned down a part in ‘The Phenix City Story’ (1955), because it required him to play a janitor whose murdered daughter was thrown on the lawn. There was no opportunity for his character to respond.
Poitier asked himself what his father would have done in the same position.
‘Reginald Poitier would never have allowed a child of his to be thrown on the lawn and not have something to say about it.’
This recourse to his parents’ values was to guide Poitier as he encountered challenges and choices throughout his career.
‘I cannot play that if I’m the son of the man I believe I am. I could not play that if my mother is the mother that I think she was.’
Poitier also had to reckon with the Cold War paranoia about communism that had swept the nation in the 1950s. As a friend and admirer of the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, he was monitored by the authorities. When he played a tough juvenile in the school drama ‘Blackboard Jungle’ (1955), he was asked to sign a loyalty oath. He refused.
‘There are some things that you have to say ‘no’ to. My integrity was more important than to play politics.’
Poitier pressed on. In the 1958 movie ‘The Defiant Ones,’ he and Tony Curtis were cast as two escaped convicts shackled to each other and forced to cooperate in order to survive.
Joker: You know what I mean, boy?
Noah: Yeah. And I got a needle sticking in me right now. Joker, don't call me ‘boy’.
In the closing scene, Poitier’s character spurns an opportunity to escape on his own, so as to save his white friend. Some in the Black community felt this was a sell-out. He was to face such scrutiny throughout his career.
Still from In The Heat of the Night - Sidney Potier and Rod Steiger
Poitier continued to take roles that dealt with race and equality. The film version of the Lorraine Hansberry play ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ (1961) shone a light on the lives of a Black Chicago family coming to terms with issues around housing, financial opportunity and assimilation. And ‘Paris Blues’ (1961) (in which he featured alongside Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Louis Armstrong and Diahann Carroll) contrasted American racism with Paris's open acceptance of Black people.
‘Through the eyes of the average American, unfortunately, it was impossible for them to see me.’
Ultimately it was a rather sweet role that earned Poitier an Academy Award for Best Actor. In 1963’s ‘Lilies of the Field’ he starred as an itinerant worker who helps some nuns build a chapel. He was the first Black male to win the Oscar.
‘It was a turning point, truly a turning point, in a Hollywood that had chosen to articulate us, Black people, as entirely different than we were.’
As the Civil Rights struggle intensified, Poitier joined other actors on marches and in TV interviews. (They included Sammy Davis Jr, Marlon Brando, Diahann Caroll, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Lena Horne, Paul Newman. and his great friend Harry Belafonte.) While on one voter registration initiative in Mississippi, Ku Klux Klan members tried to drive Belafonte and Poitier off the road.
‘I became interested in the Civil Rights struggle out of the necessity to survive.’
1967 was a landmark year for Poitier, as he starred in three commercially and critically successful movies. Dressed in a dark suit, crisp white shirt and narrow tie, he looked elegant, graceful, precise and composed. He sported a stern, reflective expression, which could at any moment break into a luminous smile.
In ‘To Sir, with Love’, defying the convention of the wise white mentor, Poitier played a teacher at a tough school in the East End of London. In ‘In the Heat of the Night’, he was Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia detective investigating a Mississippi murder, alongside a prejudiced police officer (Rod Steiger).
Gillespie: Virgil? That's a funny name for a n****r boy that comes from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?
Virgil Tibbs: They call me Mister Tibbs!
‘In the Heat of the Night’ featured a scene in a hothouse where a plantation owner slaps Tibbs in the face. In the original script Tibbs was to respond by walking stoically out. Poitier demanded that his character should strike the plantation owner back. It was a slap that was heard around the world.
In the third of the three classic 1967 movies, the social drama ‘Guess Who's Coming to Dinner’, Poitier played a man in a relationship with a white woman (Katharine Houghton), who brings him home to meet her parents (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy). It was extremely rare for any movie at the time to depict an interracial romance. Marriage between the races had historically been illegal in most states in the US, and was still illegal in 17 states until June 1967 (six months before the film was released).
John: Dad, you're my father. I'm your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.
Looking back at Poitier’s career, it’s striking how he was constantly confronted with dilemmas over roles, scripts and characterisation. Words and gestures, relationships and motivations, actions and reactions were all weighted with meaning. He was always having to judge where to draw the line.
’I think it’s all too easy for anyone not a participant in the cultural clashes of that era to unfairly dismiss films like ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ forgetting just how revolutionary they were in the context of their times.’
Those times were changing. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, there were riots in cities across America. Belafonte and Poitier fell out over Belafonte’s proposal for a rally in Atlanta. Poitier thought it would be a distraction. The two didn’t talk for years.
‘It’s difficult when you’re carrying other people’s dreams. So you have to hold onto the dream that’s inside yourself, and know that if you are true to that, that’s really all that matters.’
Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte
The era of Civil Rights evolved into the era of Black Power. In the early ‘70s Black audiences chose to watch Blaxploitation movies like ‘Shaft’ and ‘Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.’ These featured tough Black protagonists in gritty urban settings; storylines with violence, sex and drugs. Poitier’s noble, besuited, idealized characters suddenly seemed less relevant.
‘Given the quickly changing social currents, there was more than a little dissatisfaction rising up against me in certain quarters of the Black community, a cultural wave that would crest when the New York Times published an article titled ‘Why Do White Folks Love Sidney Poitier So?’ According to a certain taste, I was an Uncle Tom, even a ‘house negro’, for playing roles that were non-threatening for white audiences, for playing the noble negro who fulfils white liberal fantasies.’
Poitier wanted to play more varied parts. But, as the only major actor of African descent being cast in leading roles at the time, he also felt obliged to set an example.
‘If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional . . . But I'll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game. Not when there is only one Negro actor working in films with any degree of consistency.’
Poitier felt trapped and isolated.
Interviewer: Did you feel that pressure?
Poitier: You can’t help but feel it. You know it’s there all the time. You know that there is a community of people watching to see if you carry a banner that they feel is close to their hearts and to determine whether you are representative of their imagery of you, whether you should be welcomed or not.
Interviewer: Was it lonely?
Poitier: Of course it was lonely. It was lonely.
Poitier played Tibbs in a couple of sequels to ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ but from this point on, he took fewer acting roles.
‘I’ve climbed all the mountains I intended as an actor.’
Sidney Poitier, center, supporting the Poor People's Campaign at Resurrection City, a shantytown set up by protesters in Washington, D.C., in May 1968.
Chester Sheard / Getty Images
In 1969, along with Barbra Streisand and Paul Newman, Poitier formed First Artists Production Company, with a view to developing movie projects for themselves. He made a point of employing Black people behind the camera as well as in front of it.
‘What we all really wanted was to be able to make movies of our choice, make them ourselves, choose the material.’
In 1972 Poitier made his directorial debut with a Western that focused on the relationship between Black Americans and Native Americans in the nineteenth century: ‘Buck and the Preacher.’ He went on to direct a series of successful comedies: ‘Uptown Saturday Night’ (1974), ‘Let's Do It Again’ (1975) , ‘A Piece of the Action (1977), ’Stir Crazy (1980).
‘The comedies that I made, we tried to design them so that the people who are going to sit there are going to see themselves in an embracing way.’
In 2002, Poitier received the Honorary Academy Award for his contribution to American cinema. Later in the ceremony, Denzel Washington won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in ‘Training Day’, becoming the second Black actor to win. In his victory speech, Washington acknowledged Poitier:
‘I'll always be chasing you, Sidney. I'll always be following in your footsteps. There's nothing I would rather do, sir.’
Poitier died in 2022, at the age of 94.
‘I truly, truly try to be a better person tomorrow than I was today. Not a better actor, but just a better human being. And when I die, I will not be afraid of having lived.’
Sidney Poitier was a man of great talent and integrity. He broke down barriers and beat a path for others to follow. As a pioneer, he was endlessly confronted with dilemmas, and forced to calibrate his decisions on his own. He was the Lonely Leader, demonstrating that a set of deeply held values can help steer a course through troubled waters.
‘Everything I knew in terms of values, in terms of right and wrong, in terms of who I was values-wise, had to come from my parents. I was always watching them, their treatment of each other, how they cared for each other, how they behaved with their friends, how they behaved with other people in the village. And I would behave as close to that as I could. Because I would see the results of their behaviour.’
'The time has come
For closing books and long last looks must end.
And as I leave
I know that I am leaving my best friend.
A friend who taught me right from wrong,
And weak from strong.
That's a lot to learn,
What can I give you in return?
If you wanted the moon,
I would try to make a start.
But I would rather you let me give my heart.
‘To sir, with love.’’
Lulu, 'To Sir with Love' (D Black / M London)
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