There were great actors before Sidney Poitier, and great ones since. But the world would have been markedly different without Poitier—the first Black actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor—who arrived on the theater and film scene in post-World War II America just as this country, not to mention the world, was scrambling to reassemble itself.
Poitier, who has died at 94, helped reshape that world to such a degree that we’ll never be able to reckon fully with his impact. All actors owe him a debt, and all Americans do, too.
Poitier was born in Miami in 1927, while his parents, tomato farmers, were visiting from their home of Cat Island, in the Bahamas. The youngest of seven children, Poitier grew up on Cat Island and in Nassau, before moving to Miami at age 15 to live with his older brother. From there, he made his way by bus to New York City, where, after a brief, unhappy stint in the Army, he attempted to launch a career onstage.
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Finding his way
There were some early false starts: He auditioned for the American Negro Theatre by reading an article from True Confessions magazine, not realizing he was supposed to have brought a dramatic text. But before long he’d earned a spot in the road company of Anna Lucasta, Philip Yordan’s play about working-class Polish-American family, which had been adapted by the American Negro Theatre with an all-Black cast. In 1949, just after Poitier had landed a good role in the Theatre Guild of America’s production of Lost in the Stars, he auditioned, on a whim, for a Hollywood movie. He was as surprised as anyone when he landed the part: In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, Poitier plays a young doctor at a county hospital, Luther Brooks, who stirs the anger of a racist thug, Ray (Richard Widmark), when Ray’s brother dies after being treated by Brooks.
No Way Out, with its backdrop of racial unrest and its awareness of complex striations of race and class, is a striking movie, and Poitier’s…
Source : time
