Sidney poitier actor biography examples

Bahamian-American actor, filmmaker, diplomat (1927–2022)

For his daughter, the actress, see Sydney Tamiia Poitier.

Sidney Poitier (PWAH-tyay; February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian-American actor, film director, activist, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a Grammy Award as well as nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. In 1999, he was ranked among the "American Film Institute's 100 Stars". Poitier was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

Poitier's family lived in the Bahamas, then still a Crown colony, but he was born in Miami, Florida, while they were visiting, which automatically granted him U.S. citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved to Miami at age 15, and to New York City when he was 16. He joined the American Negro Theatre, landing his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955). Poitier gained stardom for his leading roles in films such as The Defiant Ones (1958) for which he made history becoming the first African American to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. Additionally Poitier won the Silver Bear for Best Actor for that performance. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963).

Poitier broke ground playing strong leading African American male roles in films such as Porgy and Bess (1959), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965). He acted in three films in 1967, films which tackled race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, the latter of which earned him Golde

Sidney PoitierKBE (February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian and American actor, movie director, and diplomat. He became a star in American movies and plays which went against racialstereotypes, and made black actors more respected in mainstream roles.

From 1997 through 2007, he was the Bahamianambassador to Japan.

Early life

Poitier was born in Miami, Florida. He grew up with his family on remote Cat Island, in the Bahamas. His mother was called Evelyn and his father was called Reginald James Poitier. They had a farm. Poitier's birth was premature and people did not expect him to survive, but his parents stayed three months in Miami until he became well. Since he was born in Miami, Poitier automatically gained U.S. citizenship.

When he was 15, Poitier's parents sent him off Miami to live with his older brother. At 17, he moved to New York City and got several menial jobs. During this time, he was arrested for vagrancy (being homeless) after having to leave his home for not paying rent. He decided to join the United States Army. He worked as a dishwasher until he got a job with the American Negro Theater.

Acting career

Poitier was tone deaf, and could not sing or dance. This is what black actors did at the time, so audiences did not like him. He worked very hard to improve his acting skills, and to get rid of his Bahamian accent. He eventually got a leading role in the Broadway play called Lysistrata and he got excellent reviews. At the end of 1949, he got a job working for Darryl F. Zanuck in the movie No Way Out (1950). He played a doctor treating a white bigot. After this job, he soon got more movie roles. The acting jobs he got were better and more interesting than the roles most black actors played at the time.

In 1955, he played a member of an badly behaved high school class in

Poitier knew that as the first, and for a time the only, black leading man in Hollywood he was representing an entire race. He insisted on humanity, wiping the slate clean of the demoralizing stereotypes that had come before, roles he characterized as “bug-eyed maids and shuffling butlers.”

“Poitier embodied the black image for the dawning Age of Integration,” Aram Goudsouzian writes in his sweeping biography of 2004, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon. “By the late 1950s, he was the Martin Luther King of the movies.”

The Year of Magical Filming

By 1967 the Poitier persona was an event in itself, larger than life. His three directors that year—Clavell, Jewison, Kramer—pull the camera in close whenever they can, filling the screen with his face, piercing in anger, beatific in delight. The camera of its own accord seems to be mesmerized by his hands, which are almost intellectual, as deliberately inflected as his line readings. In each movie he wears a gray flannel suit as if it were a form of lightweight knight’s armor—double-vented in To Sir, with Love; single-vented in In the Heat of the Night; no vents in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. (“He’s never gotten his due as a style icon,” notes Elvis Mitchell. “You hear the talk about Cary Grant and Steve McQueen, but I don’t think anybody wore a suit better than Sidney Poitier.”) All three movies take place in the present, and in all three Poitier—virtuosic with silence and stillness, a tilt of the head, a turning away—holds key scenes in suspension, opening up shears of uncertainty, long seconds of What’s-going-on? and What-are-we-feeling? while the ground is invisibly shifting. All three pictures crossed lines.

“It’s a remarkable year for Sidney,” says Jewison. “All three films are carried by his presence, and they’re all battering against discrimination in some way, in some form.”

Award-winning actor, director, and author, Sidney Poitier broke racial barriers and stereotyping in the film industry to become one of the leading African American actors of the 20th Century. In a career that spanned 57 years, Poitier was a featured performer or starred in 48 films and directed six.

Sidney Poitier was born on February 20, 1927 in Miami, Florida to Bahamian parents, Evelyn Outten Poitier and Reginald James Poitier, who traveled from their farm on Cat Island, the Bahamas to Miami to sell their produce. Although he was born in Florida, he spent his childhood in The Bahamas on Cat Island, an island with a population of 4,000 and no electricity. At the age of fifteen, Poitier moved to Miami to live with his older brother. Two years later, Poitier relocated to New York City, where he was arrested for vagrancy and thrown out of his apartment for not paying his rent. After this brush with the law, Poitier joined the US Army in 1945.

After two years in the army, Poitier decided on an impulse to audition at the American Negro Theater. Although he was initially rejected, Poitier was determined to become an actor. He worked on getting rid of his Bahamian accent and improving his performance for six months. On his second audition, he was accepted into the American Negro Theater Company.

Poitier’s first role was a small part in a Broadway production of Lysistrata

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. He received great reviews, and by the end of 1949 Poitier was given the opportunity to star in films.  In 1950, Poitier made his film debut in No Way Out,

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where he played a doctor who treats a white bigot. In 1951, he played a South African minister and political activist in Cry, the Beloved Country

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. In 1955, Poitier played a troubled teenager in Blackboard Jungle although at the time he was 27. Three years later, Po