Sidney Poitier’s life, which ended Thursday, had started prematurely in Miami on February 20, 1927.
His mother Evelyn gave birth to the future Hollywood legend two months before the calculated date.
What is attributed to premature babies is a special will to fight. Poitier always exposed this tenacious trait. Also because he had to. He grew up in poverty on Cat Island in the Bahamas. His parents were farmers and drove taxis. At 15 they sent Sidney back to Miami, to live with his brother.
The road to becoming the first African-American Oscar winner in the leading actor category – in 1964 as a black worker on a white nun’s farm in “Lilien auf dem Feld” – was to be a tough one. The parental plan to know their son safe failed. He wanted to try his luck in New York and slept homeless at a bus stop or, depending on the source, even in the toilet house there. The racism, which he was not familiar with from his homeland, which is almost exclusively black, shocked him deeply. The first audition failed.
His will intervened. And it seemed as if Poitier wanted to grab all the bad that happened to him and turn it into gold. He trained his dialect, practiced, rehearsed, made it to Broadway and conjured up its turning point. An agent saw him. And he was hired for a leading role in the direction of Joseph Mankiewicz (“Citizen Kane”): “Hatred is Blind” (1950). With a strong physical presence and a fine spirit, he made his contribution to an Oscar-nominated film that is typical of Poitier. Its synopsis begins by labeling it as an “African American man”. It is followed by a conflict that results from the opposition to “the whites”.
In “The hatred is blind” he gives a doctor who is supposed to treat racist brothers. In “Escape in Chains” (1958) he is chained as a black prisoner to a white one (Tony Curtis). In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (1967) he is the black fiancé who takes on “father” Spencer Tracy. “In the Heat of the Night” (1967) he is asked as a civil servant to clarify the murder in a racist environment.
Stars today would by no means be satisfied with characters whose basic motivation stems from a gap. They owe that they can do that to Poitier: he tore down the barriers. The father of six daughters between 48 and 69 wrote film history and shaped an important chapter in equality.
Source: Nachrichten
