Sidney Poitier made history, on the screen and off. He opened up possibilities for generations of Black actors and Black audiences.
NEW YORK -- We go to movies not just to escape, but to discover. We might identify with the cowboy or the runaway bride or the kid who befriends a creature from another planet.Sidney Poitier, who died Thursday at 94, was the rare performer who really did change lives, who embodied possibilities once absent from the movies. His impact was as profound as Method acting or digital technology, his story inseparable from the story of the country he emigrated to as a teenager.
Poitier not only upended the kinds of movies Hollywood made, but how they were filmed. For decades, Black and white actors had been shot with similar lighting, leading to an unnatural glare in the faces of Black performers. On the 1967 production"In the Heat of the Night," cinematographer Haskell Wexler adjusted the lighting for Poitier so the actor's features were as clear as those of white cast members.
In 2009 President Barack Obama, whose own steady bearing was sometimes compared to Poitier's, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that the actor"not only entertained but enlightened ... revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together." But even in his prime, his films were chastised as sentimental and 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.
"When these come along, their anger, their rage, their resentment, their frustration - these feelings ultimately mature by will of their own discipline into a positive energy that can be used to fuel their positive, healthy excursions in life," he wrote. "I'll always be chasing you, Sidney," Washington said as he accepted his award."I'll always be following in your footsteps."
Back in Harlem in the mid-1940s, 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 and read from it. Poitier had never seen a play and stumbled through his lines in a thick Caribbean accent. The director sent him off.
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