From Sir, with Love: Sidney Poitier: 1927-2022

Here's the pre-obituary I wrote for Amazon's now-defunct blog, Armchair Commentary, in 2009. I'm happy to say Poitier outlived this piece by 13 years. 

Oscar-winning actor and director Sidney Poitier died on January 6, 2022 at the age of 94.

Best known for the movies Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir, with Love, Poitier divided his time between the silver screen, the theater, and the civil rights movement, leaving an enduring body of work and opening doors to other performers of color. 

 

For his part in Lilies of the Fields, Poitier was the first African-American actor to win the Academy Award for best actor in a leading role.

Born in Miami, Florida, Poitier grew up in the Bahamas and learned his trade through a stint with the American Negro Theatre, through which he befriended fellow actors and activists Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. He found another lifelong friend in Richard Widmark with whom he starred in No Way Out and The Bedford Incident.

Other notable works for film and television include Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis, Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess with Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis, Jr. (long unavailable on home video), A Patch of Blue, and the made-for-TV movies Separate But Equal as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Mandela and de Klerk, where he played Nelson Mandela opposite Sir Michael Caine's F.W. de Klerk.

Poitier penned two memoirs, 1980's This Life and 2007's New York Times bestseller The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, and one novel, Montaro Caine, and directed nine feature films, including Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again with Bill Cosby, and Stir Crazy with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Released in 1975, Let's Do It Again remains one of the most profitable Black feature films of all time.

Among his many accomplishments, Poitier garnered a Tony nomination for playing Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (he also starred in the 1961 motion picture with Ruby Dee) and, although he chose not to use the honorarium "Sir," a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974. Eighteen years later, the American Film Institute recognized him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Furthermore, John Guare based his play Six Degrees of Separation on a real-life con man claiming to be Poitier's son. Rapper-turned-sitcom star Will Smith began the road to movie stardom when he took on the part in the 1993 feature-film adaptation.

Sidney Poitier is survived by his widow of 46 years, Joanna Shimkus, and six children, including two with his first wife, Juanita Hardy. Youngest daughter, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, follows in her father's substantial footsteps as a television and film actress.   

Click here for my obituary for Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison who directed Sidney Poitier in The Heat of the Night. 

Images from the Motion Picture Academy (Poitier in 1964), The Library of Congress (Poitier with Dorothy Dandridge in 1959's Porgy and Bess), and the IMDb (poster for the Warner Bros release Let's Do It Again).