Sydney Poitier
By Michael Lombardi
Sidney Poitier was born on February 20, 1927 while his
parents were traveling to Miami, Florida from the Bahamas where they had a farm.
Sidney's parents didn't expect him to be born on the boat ride; he was born
early and wasn't expected to survive the voyage. Poitier spent his childhood
on Cat Island that only had a population of about fifteen hundred people, where
there was no electricity or formal education. Then in his teenage years Poitier
lived in Nassau with relatives and tried to seek employment. As a result of
not following the rules and being labeled a juvenile delinquent at the age of
fifteen Poitier made the voyage to Miami to live with his older brother in order
to gain some structure to his life. At this early age Poitier first witnessed
racism in American life, and it is here that his experience was the seed for
his desire to create a place for blacks to have opportunity in American culture
later on in his life, due to the harsh treatment he received on the street as
a youth. At age eighteen Poitier moved to New York, and worked for a short time for
the Army at a veteran's hospital, before bouncing around from a few different
jobs. He didn't find anything interesting until he first auditioned at the American
Negro Theatre; despite being rejected harshly at his first audition, he knew
he had found his calling. In fact, the rejection he received during his first
audition fueled his focus in his study of the stage. For the next six months
Poitier refined his accent from Cat Island and dedicated his time completely
to theatre. His hard work paid off, because not too far thereafter he was cast
for the lead role in the Broadway production Lysistrata. The play was a success. Towards the end of 1949, Poitier was offered to work for Darryl F. Zanuck in
the film No Way Out, which he took, and acted as a doctor who was treating
a white bigot. This role defined him more than other black actors of his day,
and finally he had found a way to express his imagination that developed from
those early late teenage years on the streets of Miami. Poitier married Juanita
Hardy, had four children, divorced, then married Joana Shimkus and had two children. He played a student in a rebelled high school in Blackboard Jungle in
1955. Poitier was given his first Academy Award nomination as Best Actor for
his performance in The Defiant Ones in 1958. The roles he took next were
instrumental in breaking the wall between whites and blacks in the performing
arts. Poitier acted in the original production of A Raisin in the Sun
in 1959; the play was such a success it was made into a film in 1961, then he
became the first black actor to win an Oscar in a leading role in the 1963 film
Lilies of the Field as his role of Homer Smith. Later in the 1965 Poitier
acted in films such as A Patch Blue co-starring Elizabeth Hartman and
Shelley Winters. In 1967 he played in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, then
in 1967 in To Sir, with Love. During 1974 Poitier was appointed as Knight Commander by Queen Elizabeth II
from the right and recommendation of his Bahamian citizenship, and then was
given the Life Achievement Award in 2000 by the Screen Actors Guild. In the
generation where Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court and Martin
Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Prize, Sir Sidney Poitier was the first black
man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.