14 January 2022 The Guardian Weekly33
F
or postwar America, Sidney
Poitier became something
like the Black Cary Grant:
a strikingly handsome and
well-spoken Bahamian-American
actor. He was a natural fi lm star who
projected passion, yet tempered by a
kind of refi nement and restraint that
white moviegoers found reassuring.
Poitier, who died last week aged 94,
was graceful, manly, self-possessed,
with an innate dignity and a tremen-
dous screen presence. He also had a
beautiful, melodious voice – the result
of his childhood spent in the Bahamas,
and then struggling early years in New
York, trying to make it as an actor and
privately studying the voices of melli-
fl uous white radio announcers. He was
a traditional, classical actor in many
ways, following in the footsteps of
Paul Robeson and Canada Lee , but
eminently castable in a new genera-
tion of modern roles.
Almost all his famous movie roles
are defi ned by race and racial diff er-
ence, particularly that extraordinary
trio of movies that came out in o ne
year, 1967. In To Sir With Love , he wasthe teacher in swinging London who
gets through to the kids by challeng-
ing them to be adults. In Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner he is the man who
wants to marry a young white woman,
in an America where this was still ille-
gal in many southern states. And in In
the Heat of the Night he was the homi-
cide detective forced to assist a bigoted
white cop, played by Rod Steiger.
Poitier was always admired for his
style and intelligence and an instinc-
tive, classical technique. But as the
60s unfolded, in a new era of radical
Black power , Poitier found himself
unfashionable, derided as a pseudo-
white sellout, the safe option for a
reactionary movie industry that would
tolerate only this prettily spoken
Uncle Tom. The Black dramatist Clif-
ford Mason wrote a New York Times
article denouncing Poitier, claiming
that “artistical NAACPism is all that
this whole period of Sidney Poitier
moviemaking stands for ”. Poitier
withdr ew from acting, returning to
lower-key character roles in the late
80s (including, inevitably, a perfor-
mance as Nelson Mandela in a TVmovie opposite Michael Caine as
FW de Klerk ). But he became a well-
regarded director, in charge of the
commercial hit Stir Crazy , with Gene
Wilder and Richard Pryor.
Poitier’s breakthrough was No
Way Out in 1950, a noir crime picture
directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, in
which he is the hospital doctor who
has to treat a white racist hood-
lum. Five years later, at the ripe old
age of 28, Poitier was cast as a trou-
bled teen in Blackboard Jungle , the
brow- furrowing “issue movie ” about
teenage delinquency and inner-city
schools – bookended later by his
teacher in To Sir With Love. Race
was also a factor in Edge of the City
(1957), in which he plays an easy going
dock worker who becomes a mentor
fi gure to a troubled guy (a young John
Cassavetes) on the run.
But it was in The Defi ant Ones (1958)
that he was more uninhibited, as the
prisoner shackled to Tony Curtis’s
bigoted criminal, making their escape
together and fi nally becoming friends.
Then came the movie for which he
became the fi rst Black man to win the
best actor Oscar in 1964: in Lilies of
the Field , he played a regular joe bam-
boozled into doing manual labour for
some expatriate German nuns, fi nally
building their chapel, and achieving
a mysterious if sentimental kind of
redemption for him and them.
Some of Poitier’s performances do
seem a bit tame, and the fact that for
so long he seemed to be Hollywood’s
sole Black actor left him exposed. He
was upset by the 1990 stage play Six
Degrees of Separation by John Guare ,
based on the true story of a con man
who tricked his way into the apart-
ments of rich white people by pre-
tending to be the son of Sidney Poi-
tier. Some critics found in this a wicked
parable for the way Poitier had been
permitted to become a house guest in
the white world of American culture.
But in the 21st century, Poitier’s
achievements have been reassessed.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was,
after all, about interracial marriage
and sex – a subject from which mod-
ern Hollywood now runs a mile. Poitier
tackled it with dignity and candour.
The richness and strength of his per-
formances in Edge of the City, Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the
Heat of the Night make him a screen
pioneer and a Hollywood legend.
PETER BRADSHAW IS THE GUARDIAN’S
FILM CRITIC Sidney Poitier
pictured circa
1970
GRAHAM STARK/HULTON
ARCHIVE/GETTY1927-2022Sidney Poitier
A natural fi lm star who quietly
pioneered a revolution
By Peter BradshawThe bard barred
Bafflingly, Poitier
refused to play
Othello – a role in
which he would
surely have been
tremendous –
because of the
negative image
of Black people
it promoted,
preferring
projects such
as his sonorous
LP recording
of readings
from Plato.Spotlight
Culture