Mourning for Sidney Poitier: Farewell to Hollywood’s pioneer

Coming from a humble background in the Bahamas, he wrote Hollywood history: In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first black man to win the Oscar for best actor. Now the film icon has died.

Sidney Poitier was many things to the people in America: an actor, a superstar, a bridge builder between black and white. For his six daughters he was a role model in how to lead a self-determined life, as his daughter Sydney Tamiia explained in an interview last year: “He always told us: Be the captain of your own ship. We have to know our moral compass and take this direction – no matter what happens around us. “

From poor backgrounds to Hollywood

Your father knows what he’s talking about. Because Poitier has had an amazing Hollywood career. He grew up in poor circumstances in the Bahamas; only a few years of school were granted to him. Despite this humble start, he became a film legend. Talk show host Oprah Winfrey once told Poitier: “My parents taught me I had basic rights. That I was someone. We had no money, no electricity, no running water. My parents taught me, anyway, that I was someone was. “

At the age of 18 he first went to New York and played on Broadway. In 1950 he played in the Hollywood film “Hatred is Blind”, a racism drama.

The conflicts between the black and white US populations remain a major issue in the films he starred in. And Poitier also breaks taboos – as in the film “Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner”, in which a white woman and a black man kissed on screen for the first time. That was in 1967.

In the film, a dialogue develops between the woman’s father, played by Spencer Tracy, and Poitier in the role of the future son-in-law. “Have you ever thought about the problems your children will have?” Asks the father. “Yes,” replies Poitier, “you will have some.”

A trailblazer for many blacks

Three years earlier, Poitier had made history in Hollywood. He was the first black man to be awarded an Oscar for Best Actor – for his role in “Lilien auf dem Felde”. In it he plays a casual worker who helps a couple of nuns of German descent to build a chapel.

His role in the film “In the Heat of the Night”, in which he plays an investigator who is supposed to solve a murder case in a small town in the racist south, is also legendary. In what is probably the most famous scene, the alleged perpetrator slaps the character Poitiers in the face. This hits back quickly and a little harder. He, the black man, is fighting back. Director Norman Jewison later said it was the slap that was heard around the world.

Many black actors and actresses name Poitier as their role model, as a trailblazer for many other black people in Hollywood. In 2009 Poitier received the “Presidential Medal of Freedom”, the highest civilian honor in the USA. It was awarded by the then US President Barack Obama. He said that Poitier does not make films, but creates milestones of artistic extra class and American progress.