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Poitier created a distinguished film legacy in
a single year with three 1967 films at a time when segregation
prevailed in much of the United States.
In "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" he played a Black man with a
white fiancee and "In the Heat of the Night" he was Virgil Tibbs,
a Black police officer confronting racism during a murder
investigation. He also played a teacher in a tough London school
that year in "To Sir, With Love."
Poitier had won his history-making best actor Oscar for "Lilies
of the Field" in 1963, playing a handyman who helps German nuns
build a chapel in the desert. Five years before that Poitier had
been the first Black man nominated for a lead actor Oscar for
his role in "The Defiant Ones."
His Tibbs character from "In the Heat of the Night" was
immortalized in two sequels - "They Call Me Mister Tibbs!" in
1970 and "The Organization" in 1971 - and became the basis of
the television series "In the Heat of the Night" starring
Carroll O'Connor and Howard Rollins.
His other classic films of that era included "A Patch of Blue"
in 1965 in which his character was befriended by a blind white
girl, "The Blackboard Jungle" and "A Raisin in the Sun," which
Poitier also performed on Broadway.
"If you wanted the sky i would write across the sky in letters
that would soar a thousand feet high.. To Sir… with Love Sir
Sidney Poitier R.I.P. He showed us how to reach for the stars,"
Whoopi Goldberg, Oscar winning actress and TV host, wrote on
Twitter.
"The dignity, normalcy, strength, excellence and sheer
electricity you brought to your roles showed us that we, as
Black folks, mattered!!!," Oscar winner Viola Davis tweeted.
Poitier was born in Miami on Feb. 20, 1927, and raised on a
tomato farm in the Bahamas, and had just one year of formal
schooling. He struggled against poverty, illiteracy and
prejudice to become one of the first Black actors to be known
and accepted in major roles by mainstream audiences.
Poitier picked his roles with care, burying the old Hollywood
idea that Black actors could appear only in demeaning contexts
as shoeshine boys, train conductors and maids.
"I love you, I respect you, I imitate you," Denzel Washington,
another Oscar winner, once told Poitier at a public ceremony.
As a director, Poitier worked with his friend Harry Belafonte
and Bill Cosby in "Uptown Saturday Night" in 1974 and Richard
Pryor and Gene Wilder in 1980's "Stir Crazy."
Poitier was knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in 1974 and
served as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan and to UNESCO, the
U.N. cultural agency. He also sat on Walt Disney Co's board of
directors from 1994 to 2003.
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Poitier grew up in the small Bahamian village of Cat Island and
in Nassau before he moved to New York at 16, lying about his age
to sign up for a short stint in the Army and then working at odd
jobs, including dishwasher, while taking acting lessons.
The young actor got his first break when he met the casting
director of the American Negro Theater. He was an understudy in
"Days of Our Youth" and took over when the star, Belafonte, who
also would become a pioneering Black actor, fell ill.
Poitier went on to success on Broadway in "Anna Lucasta" in 1948
and, two years later, got his first movie role in "No Way Out"
with Richard Widmark.
In all, he acted in more than 50 films and directed nine,
starting in 1972 with "Buck and the Preacher" in which he
co-starred with Belafonte.
In 1992, Poitier was given the Life Achievement Award by the
American Film Institute, the most prestigious honor after the
Oscar, joining recipients such as Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock,
Fred Astaire, James Cagney and Orson Welles.
"I must also pay thanks to an elderly Jewish waiter who took
time to help a young Black dishwasher learn to read," Poitier
told the audience. "I cannot tell you his name. I never knew it.
But I read pretty good now."
In 2002, an honorary Oscar recognized "his remarkable
accomplishments as an artist and as a human being."
Poitier married actress Joanna Shimkus, his second wife, in the
mid-1970s. He had six daughters with his two wives and wrote
three books - "This Life" (1980), "The Measure of a Man: A
Spiritual Autobiography" (2000) and "Life Beyond Measure:
Letters to My Great-Granddaughter" (2008).
"If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're
not going to get very far," he told the Washington Post. "The
journey has been incredible from its beginning. So much of life,
it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness."
Poitier wrote three autobiographical books and in 2013 published
"Montaro Caine," a novel that was described as part mystery,
part science fiction.
In 2009, Poitier was awarded the highest U.S. civilian honor,
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Barack Obama.
The 2014 Academy Awards ceremony marked the 50th anniversary of
Poitier's historic Oscar and he was there to present the award
for best director.
(Reporting by Katharine Jackson; Editing by Howard Goller and
Diane Craft)
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