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Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94

The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”

By William Grimes

Jan. 7, 2022Updated 11:54 a.m. ET

Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, has died at 94.

His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No other details were immediately provided.

Mr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.

Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.

“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”

At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.

“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-s*xual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”

Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him. ......

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By Dennis McLellan
Feb. 5, 2020
3:33 PM

Kirk Douglas, the dimple-chinned screen icon who was known for bringing an explosive, clenched-jawed intensity to a memorable array of heroes and heels in films such as “Spartacus” and “Champion” and for playing an off-screen role as a maverick independent producer who helped end the Hollywood blacklist, has died. He was 103.

Douglas, who continued to act occasionally after overcoming a stroke in 1996 that impaired his speech, died Wednesday in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, his son Michael said in a statement to The Times.

The stage-trained Douglas earned the first Oscar nomination of his long acting career playing one of the post-World War II era’s anti-heroes: the ruthlessly ambitious boxer in the 1949 drama “Champion.”

Douglas later received Oscar nominations for his performances as an opportunistic movie mogul in the 1952 drama “The Bad and the Beautiful” and as tormented artist Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 biographical drama “Lust for Life.”

“I have never felt any need to project a certain image as an actor,” Douglas wrote in “The Ragman’s Son,” his bestselling 1988 autobiography. “I like a role that is stimulating, challenging, interesting to play. That’s why I’m often attracted to characters that aren’t likable.”

Never a fan of the Hollywood studio system — he likened the standard seven-year studio contract to slavery — Douglas launched his own independent production company in 1955.

Named after Douglas’ immigrant mother, the Bryna Co. produced a number of films in which Douglas starred, including director Stanley Kubrick’s landmark anti-war film, “Paths of Glory,” “The Vikings” and “Spartacus.” Douglas’ Joel Productions, named after one of his sons, also produced “Seven Days in May” and “Lonely Are the Brave.”

As executive producer of “Spartacus,” Douglas helped end the Hollywood blacklist by giving blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit under his own name for his work on the 1960 Roman-Empire epic that starred Douglas as the gladiator-trained slave-revolt leader.

In acknowledgment of a career that spanned more than 60 years and more than 80 films, Douglas was honored late in life with numerous major awards: The American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, a Kennedy Center Honor, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and an honorary Oscar for his “50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community.”

“He’s one of the legendary figures of his era,” said film historian Jeanine Basinger, chair of the Film Studies Department at Wesleyan University, who first saw Douglas on screen as a young movie-goer in the late 1940s.

“I immediately focused on him because he was different,” Basinger told The Times. “He wasn’t a traditional leading man, really, in looks, and yet he had an unmistakable charisma and power on screen — not just the glamour of the movie star, though he did have that, but real acting chops. So you knew he was going to be a star.”

Dougla s, she said, “embodied the anti-hero in movies” in films such as “Champion” and “Ace in the Hole,” in which he played an unscrupulous newspaper reporter who cynically exploits a tragedy to boost his career.

“He was a very modern American anti-hero type, but he could also play anything, really,” said Basinger.