From Yahoo:
“Barrier-breaking Sidney
Poitier, 1st Black actor to win Best Actor Oscar, dead at 94”
Sidney Poitier, the trailblazing
leading man who in the Civil Rights era loomed as large as an inspirational
figure as he did a movie star, died Thursday. He was 94. A source close to the
family confirmed his death to NBC News on Friday after the Bahamian Minister of
Foreign Affairs first shared the news. Yahoo Entertainment has reached out to a
Poitier rep for a statement. In 1964, Poitier became the first African American
to win the Best Actor Oscar. Poitier's film credits include In the Heat of the
Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Defiant Ones and Lillies of the Field.
All but the latter, which brought Poitier the Academy Award, were explicitly
about the defining topic of his career, if not his times: race. To Black artists who came of age during
Poitier's heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the actor was their North Star.
Poitier was, after all, not merely mainstream Hollywood's first Black movie
star; in the mid-20th century, he was the only Black movie star. "He meant
everything to me," Denzel Washington, the first Black actor since Poitier
to claim Best Actor, said at the 1992 American Film Institute tribute to his
mentor. "He was a positive example of elegance and good taste." Poitier's
grace was exhibited under intense pressure. If his films weren't being banned
by local (white) governments, then his rise to box-office prominence was taken
down a notch by (Black) critics who saw his movie roles as too accommodating. "I was carrying the hopes and aspirations
of an entire people," Poitier said in 1989. "It was a terrific
burden."
Born Feb. 20, 1927, in Miami,
Poitier was raised in the Bahamas. As an impoverished young teen, he returned
to Florida, and for the first time was confronted with the racial-segregation
laws that then ruled the South. Poitier soon moved north to New York City. There,
he scraped by as a dishwasher and janitor. He was in and out of the Army. At
the end of his rope, he wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt and asked for
$100 so he could return to the Bahamas. He never heard back from the White
House. Instead, he found Harlem's American Negro Theatre, the launching pad of
Black stars such as Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Harry Belafonte. While going on
stage in place of Belafonte, his future lifelong friend and fellow trailblazer,
he caught a producer's eye. In 1946, at age 19, he made his Broadway debut. Poitier's
fortunes were changing about as rapidly as United States society. In 1947,
Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. In 1948, the
U.S. Army was ordered to end segregation in its ranks. And in 1950, the
24-year-old Poitier played a doctor in his first major Hollywood film, No Way
Out.
Poitier was not naive to think
his breakthrough was anything but a beginning, and a fitful one at that. Cities
such as Chicago banned No Way Out fearing its storyline, which pitted Poitier's
character against white racists, "could cause trouble." Poitier,
meanwhile, felt stunted by the same stereotypes that had always stunted Black
film actors. "Hollywood as a rule still doesn't want
to portray us as anything but butlers, chauffeurs, gardeners or maids,"
Poitier told the New York Times in 1951. Poitier exerted control over his career the
only way he could: He said "no." "I decided in my life that I would do
nothing that did not reflect positively on my father's life. That is where I
got the 'I will not do this, I will not do that.' I just said no," Poitier
said to the Associated Press in 1999. Early
movies Poitier said "yes" to included 1954's Blackboard Jungle, a
classroom drama that introduced audiences to rock 'n' roll and juvenile
delinquents; and, 1958's The Defiant Ones, a parable about a Black convict
(Poitier) and a white convict (Tony Curtis) who are forced to work things out
when they are literally chained together. Poitier was nominated for Best Actor for The
Defiant Ones, a historic nod. He was only the fourth African American to crack
the acting categories (after Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge and Ethel
Waters); he was the first-ever African American male to do so.
For Poitier, though, there was
almost always a price to pay for success: In order to land The Defiant Ones,
for instance, he had to agree to star in the big-screen adaptation of Porgy and
Bess, the George and Ira Gershwin musical that introduced standards such as
"Summertime," but long troubled African-Americans with its depiction
of poor, Black Southerners. Prior to Poitier coming on board, Belafonte
rejected the movie, indicating he'd never play any role that required him to
"spend all his time on his knees." Porgy and Bess underwhelmed at the 1959 box
office, but it and the Defiant Ones Oscar nomination definitively established
Poitier as a movie star. It was lonely at the top. "To be the only Black person on the
entire [studio] lot except for the shoeshine boy," Poitier said in 1987.
"It invited an excruciating sense of responsibility."In 1959, Poitier
triumphantly returned to New York to star in the original Broadway production
of A Raisin in the Sun. He likewise headlined the 1961 film version. In 1963,
Poitier became the "the first solo, above-the-title movie star," as
Washington put it at the 2002 Oscars, with Lillies of the Field. The feel-good
drama about a drifter (Poitier) who helps nuns build a chapel was a popular and
critical hit, and it won Poitier his groundbreaking Oscar. "It is a long journey to this
moment," a beaming Poitier said as he accepted the Best Actor statuette. Lillies of the Field set the template for much
of what would follow from Poitier in the 1960s: He would play a good man, and
often the only Black man in an all-white world; he would mentor or help the film's
white protagonists. Signature Poitier movies such as To Sir With Love, A Patch
of Blue and The Slender Thread all fit the bill. A famous 1967 New York Times piece by
playwright Clifford Mason, who is Black, held up the model as an indictment of
what was wrong with Hollywood, if not Poitier's career. "He remains
unreal, as he has for nearly two decades, playing essentially the same role,
the anti-septic, one-dimensional hero...[who makes] that fateful decision to
solve the problem for 'them,' good n***er that he is," Mason wrote in
"Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?" Another memorable broadside was launched in
1969 by Times critic Vincent Canby, who was white, and who wrote, "Sidney
Poitier does not make movies, he makes milestones." The barbs came as the
Civil Rights movement was moving from sit-ins to Black-power rallies, as the
studio system was giving way to New Hollywood (not to mention the
Blaxploitation era), and as Poitier was turning 40 amid a youth culture that
was said to distrust anyone over the age of 30.
Shifting ground or no, Poitier
held steady. "I know of no movie star who is a 'heavy'
or a 'villain,'" Poitier said in 1968. That same year, Poitier topped the likes of
John Wayne and Clint Eastwood when he was ranked the No. 1 box-office draw by
the nation's movie-theater owners on the strength of the hits Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner and Best Picture winner In the Heat of the Night. Poitier's
subsequent films weren't necessarily the stuff of Oscar-night montages, but
they reflected his growing power: For Love of Ivy cast Poitier as a romantic
lead opposite an African American actress (Abbey Lincoln); They Call Me Mister
Tibbs! and The Organization had Poitier fronting a franchise (spun off from In
the Heat of the Night); Buck and the Preacher, costarring Belafonte, marked his
directing debut. Throughout the 1970s,
Poitier focused more on filmmaking than acting. In all, he directed nine films,
including the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder hit, Stir Crazy. He costarred with and
directed Bill Cosby in a trio of popular 1970s caper-comedies, Uptown Saturday
Night, Let's Do It Again and A Piece of the Action. He also directed the infamous
Cosby flop, Ghost Dad, his final film as director.
(Sidney Poitier, at the 2002
Academy Awards, has died.)
Poitier stepped away from the
spotlight to write his first memoir, My Life, published in 1980. (A second, The
Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, came out in 2000.) Poitier returned to acting in the late 1980s.
Latter-day credits included Sneakers and The Jackal. This period also saw
Poitier win a Grammy (for his audio recording of Measure of a Man), and earn
Primetime Emmy acting nominations for the TV docudramas, Separate But Equal and
Mandela and de Klerk. In his final act,
Poitier mostly loomed as a revered elder statesman. He took pride in seeing the
rise of African American stars such as Washington; he did not enter the fray
when Hollywood's continued lack of diversity was debated.
An unflashy star, Poitier only
rarely made off-screen headlines: There was an affair and on-and-off engagement
with singer-actress Diahann Carroll that spanned the 1960s, and ended both his
and her first marriages; and, there was a scam, memorialized in the play and
film, Six Degrees of Separation, that saw a con man charm Manhattan society by
pretending to be Poitier's son. When Cosby, Poitier's longtime friend, was
accused of being a serial rapist, a Poitier source let it be known in the
tabloid press that Poitier was "terribly disgusted." Poitier did not
comment on the matter publicly. In addition to the AFI tribute, Poitier was
presented with an honorary Oscar (on the same night Washington picked up his
Best Actor statuette), and celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors. In 2016,
Poitier was honored by the British Film Institute. Said to be too ill to jet to
London, Poitier, elegant-looking as ever in a tuxedo, virtually accepted the
award from his Los Angeles home. Jamie Foxx, another Oscar-winning actor who
benefitted from Poitier's groundbreaking career, stood by the elder star, as
did Poitier's daughter, actress Sydney Tamiia Poitier (Chicago P.D.). "Sydney
Poitier is the great example of what it means to live your life with integrity
and power and grace," presenter Oprah Winfrey told the BAFTA audience. Poitier
was married twice. His second marriage, to actress Joanna Shimkus, his costar
from 1969's The Lost Man, endured from 1976 to his death. Long before his
death, and long before his career wound down, Poitier's legacy was assured: He
was the first. He was the only. Against all odds, he'd found a way. "Back
then," he once said, "no route had been established for where I was
hoping to go."
^ He was a good man and Actor. ^
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