Sidney Poitier

The Full Biography

Sidney Poitier. Actor. The Cat Island boy who made a dignity into an American occupation, then spent the years after the statue proving a first was also a man with daughters and a diplomatic passport.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a Philadelphia detective in a Mississippi police station, answering a sheriff's sneer with a line about what they call him up North. The year was 1967. The picture was In the Heat of the Night. What the still cannot show is Sidney Poitier, born premature in Miami while his Bahamian parents were on a tomato run, raised on Cat Island and in Nassau, a teenager who arrived in New York barely able to read, and a man who would, after the famous decade, direct comedies, raise six daughters, and carry the Bahamas to Tokyo as an ambassador.

He was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, two months early, which gave him United States citizenship on the way to a Bahamian childhood. Reginald and Evelyn Poitier farmed tomatoes on Cat Island, a place without the electricity the American pictures assumed. Nassau came next. At fifteen he was sent to Miami to live with a brother, then went north to New York, a dishwasher who slept in a bus terminal and learned to read with the help of a Jewish waiter who sat with him after the shift. The first pressure was not a studio. It was a newspaper he could not yet get through and a Caribbean accent the American Negro Theatre told him to lose if he wanted a part.

He listened to the radio until the accent bent. He joined the American Negro Theatre, was told his West Indian mouth would not do, and treated the rejection as a syllabus. He understudied and then played on Broadway, including a Lysistrata that is now a footnote and was then a paycheck. Joseph L. Mankiewicz put him in No Way Out (1950) as Dr. Luther Brooks, a film debut that already refused the old servant grammar: a professional, a riot, a man who would not make the white patient comfortable at his own expense. Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), from Alan Paton's South Africa. Blackboard Jungle (1955), a teacher in a room that is also a threat, a picture that put rock and roll on an American soundtrack and Poitier in a classroom the country was arguing about. Good-bye, My Lady. Edge of the City (1957) with John Cassavetes, a dockside friendship the Code years could barely hold. Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958), chained to Tony Curtis, two convicts and a metaphor the earnest 1950s needed, a first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor — the first time a Black man had been named in that category. He did not win. He had been seen. Porgy and Bess (1959) is a credit he took and did not love; the opera's grammar was not his. He said so, in time, without a press agent's varnish.

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun put him on Broadway in 1959 as Walter Lee Younger and on film in 1961, a Chicago kitchen that is also an American argument. Paris Blues. Pressure Point. Then Ralph Nelson's Lilies of the Field (1963), a handyman who builds a chapel for German nuns in the Arizona desert, a part that looks light until you watch him refuse to be grateful for the chance to work. On April 13, 1964, he won Best Actor. He was the first Black man to take the category. The night was a civic object. He accepted it as a man who had once needed help with the newspaper.

I never had an occasion to question color, therefore I only saw myself as what I was — a human being.Sidney Poitier

1967 is the year the stills come from. To Sir, with Love, a teacher in London's East End. In the Heat of the Night, Virgil Tibbs, the slap returned, the name insisted upon. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a doctor in Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn's San Francisco house, an interracial engagement the Production Code years could not have filmed. Three pictures, one calendar, a country arguing with itself in the dark. He was, for that stretch, the most complete leading man the serious American pictures had allowed a Black actor to be, which is also a sentence about the pictures. He knew that. He carried it anyway.

The years after the trifecta are the ones the monuments thin out. For Love of Ivy. The Lost Man. Two more Tibbs pictures that are lesser and still his. Then the chair. He directed Buck and the Preacher (1972) and starred in it with Harry Belafonte, a Western that put Black men on horses the genre had not budgeted. Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let's Do It Again (1975), A Piece of the Action (1977) — comedies with Belafonte and Bill Cosby, a popular cinema he chose because he wanted his own people to laugh in a room he had booked. Stir Crazy (1980), with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, was the biggest hit of the directing file. He had become, without a press-kit conversion, a filmmaker who knew how to make money as well as history.

He married Juanita Hardy in 1950. Four daughters: Beverly, Pamela, Sherri, Gina. The marriage ended in 1965. He married the Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus in 1976, after years together; two more daughters, Anika and Sydney. Six daughters is a house, not a headline. The private life was, by his choice, quieter than the civic one. He had already been asked to represent a race every time he represented a part. He kept the kitchen, when he could, off the junket.

The turn is the move into directing, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers Mister Tibbs. The turn is that he got tired of being the only dignified man in the frame and built frames where Black people could be foolish, lucky, and armed. A lot of barrier-breakers become statues who only repeat the night of the statue. He became a director who booked the room.

The later years

The years after the popular comedies are a statesman's working age. He acted when the part was worth the suitcase: Shoot to Kill (1988) with Tom Berenger, a thriller that let him be competent without a sermon; Sneakers (1992), a caper with Robert Redford's company, a late pleasure; television that wanted the face as a fact, including Separate but Equal and Mandela and de Klerk, civic homework he treated as work. He wrote memoirs — This Life (1980), then The Measure of a Man (2000), then Life Beyond Measure — exact books, not souvenir programs. The sentences have the same unhurried dignity as the walk. In 1997 the Bahamas named him ambassador to Japan, a post he held for a decade, and concurrently to UNESCO. He had been made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1974. The honorary Oscar in 2002 was Denzel Washington's night as well; Washington won Best Actor the same evening for Training Day and told the room he was standing on Poitier's shoulders. The Presidential Medal of Freedom came in 2009, Barack Obama in the White House, a circle the 1964 night could not have drawn. He accepted the metals as a man who still remembered the bus terminal. Tokyo was not a ceremonial flag. He did the receptions and the quiet work of a small country's man in a large capital, a Bahamian who happened to be the most famous face in the building. The diplomatic years are the ones the clip reels skip. They are also the ones that complete the Cat Island sentence: a tomato farmer's son representing the islands to a nation that had once been on the other side of a war and was now a partner. He kept the two passports in their proper order. The American pictures had made him. The Bahamas had raised him. He would not let either claim cancel the other.

Los Angeles and the Bahamas were the two houses. Joanna was the companion of the long second marriage. The daughters made their own lives; some went into the business, some did not. Sydney Tamiia Poitier became an actress. The others kept the name in rooms the junket never saw. He was, in the last public decade, careful with his appearances and complete when he made them. A Kennedy Center Honor in 1995. The AFI Life Achievement Award in 1992, a night the industry used to say the sentence it had not known how to say in 1950. Friends from the Kramer and Nelson sets describe a professional who arrived prepared and left without a theory of his own importance. Friends from the Nassau years describe a son of Cat Island who never fully agreed to be only an American monument. Both are the life. He had held a race on his back in the 1960s and spent the next half-century deciding how much of the back was still on loan. He kept, into old age, the walk of a man who had learned a city from a bus terminal up. He did not become a talk-show habit. He became a man you saw at the honors and then did not see, which is a kind of dignity the 1967 pictures had already rehearsed. When younger Black actors asked him how to carry the civic load, he told them, in the memoirs and in the few interviews, to play the human being first. The sentence is easy to print and hard to live. He had lived it when the alternative was the servant grammar he had refused in 1950. He received, along the way, the BAFTA Fellowship and the honors the British industry gives a man who had also been a Bahamian knight. He used those evenings the way he had used the 1964 night: a short speech, a long silence, a refusal to make the burden the whole entertainment. At home the grandchildren came. Joanna kept the calendar. The two houses, Los Angeles and the islands, remained the map. He had already been the country's lesson. He spent the last quiet years as a man who had survived being the lesson, which is a different job and a longer one.

He watched a generation take the parts he had not been allowed to take — the fools, the villains, the ordinary men — and he did not pretend that progress was a straight line. He had been criticized, in the militant years, for playing saints. He knew the criticism. He also knew what the alternative had been in 1950. The memoirs hold both facts without a plea. That is a harder late style than a farewell tour.

He died on January 6, 2022, in Los Angeles, at ninety-four. The obituaries led with the Oscar and Mister Tibbs, as they had to. The better ones remembered Cat Island, the waiter, the radio, Stir Crazy, Tokyo, and the six daughters. Joanna remained. The pictures remained. A country that had once needed him to be perfect now had the luxury of remembering him as a director, a diplomat, and a father. The luxury is part of what he bought, whether the country writes the check that way or not.

What those last years were, in the daily sense, was a careful old man in a quiet house, taking the honors that still came, declining the ones that only wanted the slap, and keeping the Bahamian weather in a California room. He had already been the first. He spent the end of the file as a man who had survived being the first. That is a separate occupation, and he did it without a press agent explaining the difference.

After he was gone

The films kept playing in January, a festival the calendar had not planned. Washington and the others spoke. The Bahamas put the flags at a different height. The daughters held the name. Tibbs still answers the sheriff in every classroom that still shows the clip. The chapel in Arizona still gets built before the credits.

He came out of a tomato trip and a Cat Island childhood, learned to read after a shift, bent an accent toward a radio, took a statue the category had never given, made a year of three pictures, directed the laughs himself, carried a diplomatic passport, and died a father of six. If you only remember the slap, you have the clip. If you remember the waiter, the nuns, the Western, and Tokyo, you have him.

Portrait: Unknown photographer · Public Domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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