Sir Sidney Poitier dead at 94

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Barack Obama has paid tribute to the ‘singular talent’ of Sidney Poitier who died on Thursday aged 94. 

‘Through his groundbreaking roles and singular talent, Sidney Poitier epitomized dignity and grace, revealing the power of movies to bring us closer together. He also opened doors for a generation of actors. Michelle and I send our love to his family and legion of fans,’ Obama wrote on Twitter. 

He accompanied his tribute with a photograph of himself and Michelle with Poitier in the Oval Office after he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

Legions of famous faces from across the world shared memories and praise of the actor, including President Joe Biden who said in a statement that Poitier’s ‘work carried so much dignity, power, and grace that it changed the world on and off the big screen.’ 

Leading the Hollywood tributes were Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Harry Belafonte, Whoopie Goldberg, and Tyler Perry, who wrote: ‘The grace and class that this man has shown throughout his entire life, the example he set for me, not only as a black man but as a human being will never be forgotten.’

‘All I can say is thank you for your life, thank you for your example, and thank you for your incredible gift,’ added Perry. 

Poitier’s death was confirmed on Friday morning by Fred Mitchell, Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Bahamas, where Poitier grew up. His cause of death is not yet known.  

Poitier’s trailblazing acting career saw him win an Oscar in 1964 for his role in Lilies of the Field him, and earn two further Academy Award nominations, ten Golden Globes nominations, two Primetime Emmy Awards nominations, six BAFTA nominations, eight Laurel nominations, and one Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination. 

Twice-married, he had four daughters with his first wife Juanita Hardy and two with his second wife Joanna Shimkus, as well as eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. 

During his first marriage, he began a nine-year affair with actress Diahann Carroll, whom he met when they worked together on the 1959 movie Porgy and Bess. The fallout from the affair ended the marriages of both Carroll and Poitier, whose subsequent second marriage to Shimkus was more enduring, lasting 45 years until his death.  

In 2016, Poitier was awarded a BAFTA fellowship, but did not attend the event due to ill health.  

Poitier received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1995 and an received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2009. 

He was also awarded an Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. 

Upon news of his death, tributes flowed in from around the world, with musician Lenny Kravitz writing that Poitier ‘showed the world that with vision and grace, all is possible.’ 

Biden said in his statement that ‘Sidney was more than just one of the finest actors in our history.’

‘He blazed a path for our Nation to follow, and a legacy that touches every part of our society today,’ said Biden. 

Poitier’s close friend and great contemporary Harry Belafonte issued a statement Friday, remembering their extraordinary times together.

‘For over 80 years, Sidney and I laughed, cried and made as much mischief as we could,’ he wrote. ‘He was truly my brother and partner in trying to make this world a little better. He certainly made mine a whole lot better.’ 

Denzel Washington told the Hollywood Reporter: ‘It was a privilege to call Sidney Poitier my friend. He was a gentle man and opened doors for all of us that had been closed for years. God bless him and his family.’

Oprah Winfrey posted a photo of herself hugging Poitier, writing: ‘the greatest of the ‘Great Trees’ has fallen.’ 

‘The utmost, highest regard and praise for his most magnificent, gracious, eloquent life. I treasured him. I adored him. He had an enormous soul I will forever cherish,’ added Winfrey. 

Actor Billy Dee Williams wrote on Twitter: ‘You were an incredibly beautiful, kind soul who changed the lives of so many, and a hero to all. The world was a much better place because you were in it, and we will miss you.’ 

‘Sidney Poitier, your last sunset with us is the dawn of many generations rising in the path of light you blazed. We will always hold you in our hearts and forever speak your name,’ wrote actor and director Debbie Allen on Twitter.

‘One of the greatest actors of his generation,’ musician Questlove posted on Instagram. ‘We all have our Poitier era. Growing up in the 70s I’d have to say that maybe Uptown Saturday Night was the first movie I ever watched. … Rest in peace. And thank you.’

Actor Jeffrey Wright tweeted: ‘Sidney Poitier. What a landmark actor. One of a kind. What a beautiful, gracious, warm, genuinely regal man. RIP, Sir. With love.’ 

Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg tweeted a touching message, reciting the lyrics to the theme song from Poitier’s 1967 film To Sir, with Love.

‘If you wanted the sky I would write across the sky in letters that would soar a thousand feet high.. To Sir… with Love,’ she wrote, adding: ‘Sir Sidney Poitier R.I.P. He showed us how to reach for the stars.’

The 1967 British drama film dealt with social and racial issues in an inner city school, with Poitier playing teacher Mr Mark Thackeray.

Star of Dreamgirls and Tony winner Anika Noni Rose tweeted: ‘RIP Sidney Poitier. Thank you for being so kind, for every door you broke down and every slap you gave in return.’

‘This is a big one,’ said Oscar-winner Viola Davis. ‘No words can describe how your work radically shifted my life.’

‘The dignity, normalcy, strength, excellence and sheer electricity you brought to your roles showed us that we, as Black folks, mattered!!! It was an honor for my husband and I to share lunch with you at Spagos.’

‘You told us,’If your dreams do not scare you, they’re not big enough’! I put this quote on my daughter’s wall. Rest well Mr. Poitier. Thank you! Thank you for leaving a legacy. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote: ‘Sidney Poitier. An absolute legend. One of the greats.’ 

Former President Bill Clinton tweeted: ‘Sidney Poitier changed Hollywood, America, & the world forever through his many unforgettable performances, & through the strength, grace, & dignity he radiated both on screen and off. I’ll always be deeply grateful that I had the chance to spend time with him through the years.’ 

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 fiancée 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.

At the time, Poitier had already 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 is befriended by a blind white girl, The Blackboard Jungle and A Raisin in the Sun, which Poitier also performed on Broadway.

Poitier was born in Miami on February 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.’

He spent his early years on the remote Cat Island in the Bahamas, which had a population of 1,500 and no electricity, and he quit school at age 12 to help support the family. 

Three years later, he was sent to live with a brother in Miami; his father was concerned that the street life of Nassau was a bad influence. With $3 in his pocket, Sidney traveled steerage on a mail-cargo ship.

‘The smell in that portion of the boat was so horrendous that I spent a goodly part of the crossing heaving over the side,’ he told The Associated Press in 1999, adding that Miami soon educated him about racism. ‘I learned quite quickly that there were places I couldn´t go, that I would be questioned if I wandered into various neighborhoods.’

Poitier moved to Harlem as a teem and was so overwhelmed by his first winter there he enlisted in the Army, cheating on his age and swearing he was 18 when he had yet to turn 17. 

Assigned to a mental hospital on Long Island, Poitier was appalled at how cruelly the doctors and nurses treated the soldier patients. In his 1980 autobiography, ‘This Life,’ he related how he escaped the Army by feigning insanity.

Back in Harlem, he was looking in the Amsterdam News for a dishwasher job when he noticed an ad seeking actors at the American Negro Theater. He went there and was handed a script and told to go on the stage. Poitier had never seen a play in his life and could barely read. He stumbled through his lines in a thick Caribbean accent and the director marched him to the door.

‘As I walked to the bus, what humiliated me was the suggestion that all he could see in me was a dishwasher. If I submitted to him, I would be aiding him in making that perception a prophetic one,’ Poitier later told the AP.

‘I got so pissed, I said, `I’m going to become an actor – whatever that is. I don´t want to be an actor, but I´ve got to become one to go back there and show him that I could be more than a dishwasher.´ That became my goal.’

The process took months as he sounded out words from the newspaper. Poitier returned to the American Negro Theater and was again rejected. Then he made a deal: He would act as janitor for the theater in return for acting lessons. 

When he was released again, his fellow students urged the teachers to let him be in the class play. Another Caribbean, Belafonte, was cast in the lead. When Belafonte couldn’t make a preview performance because it conflicted with his own janitorial duties, his understudy, Poitier, went on.

The audience included a Broadway producer who cast him in an all-Black version of ‘Lysistrata.’ The play lasted four nights, but rave reviews for Poitier won him an understudy job in ‘Anna Lucasta,’ and later he played the lead in the road company. 

In 1950, he broke through on screen in No Way Out, playing a doctor whose patient, a white man, dies and is then harassed by the patient’s bigoted brother, played by Richard Widmark.

He was the escaped black convict who befriends a racist white prisoner (Tony Curtis) in The Defiant Ones. 

He was the courtly office worker who falls in love with a blind white girl in A Patch of Blue. He was the handyman in Lilies of the Field who builds a church for a group of nuns. In one of the great roles of the stage and screen, he was the ambitious young father whose dreams clashed with those of other family members in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. 

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.

Debates about diversity in Hollywood inevitably turn to the story of Poitier. With his handsome, flawless face; intense stare and disciplined style, he was for years not just the most popular black movie star, but the only one.

‘I made films when the only other black on the lot was the shoeshine boy,’ he recalled in a 1988 Newsweek interview. ‘I was kind of the lone guy in town.’

His appeal brought him burdens not unlike such other historical figures as Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was subjected to bigotry from whites and accusations of compromise from the black community. 

Poitier was held, and held himself, to standards well above his white peers. He refused to play cowards and took on characters, especially in Guess Who´s Coming to Dinner, of almost divine goodness. 

He developed a steady, but resolved and occasionally humorous persona crystallized in his most famous line – ‘They call me Mr. Tibbs!’ – from In the Heat of the Night.

‘All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value – to you I say, `I’m not talking about being as good as you. I hereby declare myself better than you,´’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘The Measure of a Man,’ published in 2000.

But even in his prime he was criticized for being out of touch. He was called an Uncle Tom and a ‘million-dollar shoeshine boy.’ In 1967, The New York Times published Black playwright Clifford Mason´s essay, ‘Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?’ Mason dismissed Poitier´s films as ‘a schizophrenic flight from historical fact’ and the actor as a pawn for the ‘white man´s sense of what´s wrong with the world.’

Stardom didn´t shield Poitier from racism and condescension. He had a hard time finding housing in Los Angeles and was followed by the Ku Klux Klan when he visited Mississippi in 1964, not long after three civil rights workers had been murdered there. In interviews, journalists often ignored his work and asked him instead about race and current events.

‘I am an artist, man, American, contemporary,’ he snapped during a 1967 press conference. ‘I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due.’

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).  

Poitier’s second marriage to Shikmus endured happily for 45 years, and he was known as doting family man to his daughters, who recalled in a 2013 interview how he used to play along when they dressed him up as children.

‘He’d be on location and we’d put barrettes in his hair,’ his youngest two daughters told the Hollywood Reporter. ‘We’d make him call room service. And he’d have to open the door with pink barrettes and lipstick on.’ 

‘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.

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’s board of directors from 1994 to 2003.

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.