Sidney Poitier, first African-American Oscar winner, is dead

Sidney Poitier, American actor and director, the first black actor to receive the Oscar for best actor in 1964 © AFP

Text by: Christophe Carmarans

12 mins

Born American by accident, actor Sidney Poitier died on January 7, 2022 at the age of 94.

He will have crossed existence with grace and contributed to breaking down racial barriers at the turn of the 1960s. First black winner of an Oscar in 1964, he had a unique trajectory in the seventh art, but also beyond.

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It's March 24, 2002, and Denzel Washington is on stage at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood with his Oscar for Best Actor in his hands for his role as a dirty cop in

.

This is the first Oscar won by a black man for a leading role since Sidney Poitier in 1964. “ 

 "Resumes falsely indignant the one who was revealed on the screen by

in 1987." 

" 

, Denzel Washington laughs then,

 ".

At this historic moment - because Halle Berry becomes that same evening in 2002 the first black actress to receive the Oscar for best actress for

 - it is indeed on Sidney Poitier that all eyes are turned then. that he himself has just been rewarded by the Academy with an

. A few hours before, straight as an i from the top of his 1.89 m, the dean of the ceremony, then 75 years old, had already caused a sensation with his presence and his elegance on the red carpet, surrounded by his wife, Joanna Shimkus, and their two daughters.

For several generations of actors from the black minority, even today, this man with an incredible destiny will have represented a model, a symbol, the one who broke down barriers with grace and dignity, almost never raising the bar. your.

An image sometimes considered a little too smooth for the taste of some at one time, often the same ones who reproached Martin Luther King for not being radical enough compared to Malcolm X. Obviously difficult to achieve unanimity;

Still, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, Sidney Poitier was the most “bankable” actor in American cinema, a distinction that is totally unimaginable when we trace the thread of his existence back to its starting point.

Self-discovery and ... racism

With Tony Curtis in "The Chain" (1958) AFP PHOTO

Marked from birth by fate, Sidney Poitier was born by accident in the United States on February 20, 1927. While his parents, Reggie and Evelyn, both Bahamians, came to spend a few days in Miami, his mother gave birth prematurely. in the metropolis of Florida, at the same time making little Sidney a British subject by blood (the Bahamas did not become independent until 1973) but also an American citizen by the right of the soil. Miami, Sidney will not return there until adolescence because it is good in the Bahamas, precisely

, 1,647 inhabitants at the last census, that he will spend the first ten years of his life. The Poitier family lives there mainly from the cultivation of tomatoes. Everything changed in 1937 when Florida decreed an embargo on tomatoes from the Bahamas, a situation which forced the young Sidney and his parents to settle in Nassau, the capital, located on another island in the archipelago.

Completely illiterate and having until then only lived in the countryside, the boy discovers the automobile in Nassau " 

 " and especially knows one of the largest .

shocks of his life when, in a store, he sees his reflection for the first time in a mirror, after having lived all this time on an island without windows or mirrors. “ 

,” he said a few years ago in an interview.

". After discovering, almost reluctantly, narcissism, the teenager will soon be confronted with racism, a concept totally unknown to him until he leaves his little island of Cat. “ 

 ” he wrote in one of his autobiographies.

He started working at the age of 12 on a construction site in Nassau. He was 15 when he left to join his older brother, Cyril, in Miami. In the early 1940s, a fortiori in the southern states, segregation was everywhere and blacks experienced daily bullying, if not much worse. One episode particularly stuck in her memory. " 

" he recounts in one of his two autobiographies

, "

." “ 

,” he explains, “

In

 ”.

" 

," he concluded, "

 ”. It is this refusal to one day be drawn into a dirty story that ends up deciding the young Sidney to migrate to New York, a city which is also hard but which offers more opportunities. Far from him, however, at that time, the idea of ​​going there to make a career in the show. He is 16 years old and is content with a small job as a diver in a restaurant that barely allows him to survive. This is where an older Jewish waiter will give him the gift that will change his life: night after night, after closing, this providential mentor will teach him to read.

Humility then glory

With his second wife Joanna Shimkus in Monaco (1983) Ralph Gatti / AFP

“ 

”he confides in

. Now more self-confident and a little less broke, the still shy beginner decides to enroll in the American Negro Theater in Harlem, where Ossie Davis and his wife Ruby Dee will also come out, as well as a certain Harry Belafonte, almost twin of Sidney Poitier since born March 1, 1927 in Harlem, of a Jamaican mother and an American father. After a first refusal because his speech still leaves much to be desired, the aspiring actor is accepted six months later and begins to learn the basics of acting. From then on, everything will be linked.

His first role in the cinema, he obtains it in

(No Way Out) of Joseph Mankiewicz. He plays the role of a black doctor confronted by a racist played by Richard Widmark. First attempt, master stroke in this quasi-prehistoric era for the minorities on the screen. Very quickly Sidney Poitier will become, with the help of his agent Marty Baum, the first choice of the great directors for the roles of "the ordinary black man victim of prejudice". He thus continues

(1952) which deals with racial segregation in South Africa,

(1955) which takes place in a vocational school in a poor district of New York,

(1957) set in Kenya and

(1957) one of Clark Gable's last major roles.

Already well-known, he exploded the following year in

(1958) by Stanley Kramer, a film with obviously high symbolic content in which two prisoners - a white, a black - who, at the start, hate each other (Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis) escape from their cellar van thanks to an accident and set off on a run linked by a chain which they cannot get rid of. The film is a triumph all over the world and obtains nine nominations at the Oscars, without however that Curtis nor Poitier, who are among the nominated for best actor, are rewarded (it is David Niven who wins that year ). Sidney Poitier was nevertheless awarded a Silver Bear in Berlin and a BAFTA in London, which further established his international stature.

Away from stereotypes

With her daughter Sydney Tamiia Poitier as the Oscars 2014 arrives in Hollywood.

Christopher Polk / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP

Aware of his responsibility, it was after much hesitation that he accepted to play the role of Porgy in the screen production of George Gershwin's opera

(1959) on the grounds that " 

”.

On the contrary, it will be a triumph that Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis Jr. savor at his side. Sidney Poitier then becomes a pioneer, the first black actor to be entrusted with “serious” roles, embodying respectability and responsibility, roles where the racial question is initially underlying, then becomes central in this troubled time when the fight for Civil Rights is mounting, a fight in which he will take part as when he takes part in the March on Washington for jobs and freedom of the 28 August 1963.

It was the following year that he created a sensation by becoming the first black to win the Oscar for best actor for

, a film that has aged in form but which proves that we can do good cinema with good feelings. The plot echoes strangely today: a black adventurer meets, in the heart of Arizona, a community of German Catholic sisters who are seeking to build a church for the Latino community of the canton which is, of course, very pious.

“ 

”he will say in an interview granted in 1967, that of his 40 years, undoubtedly his most prolific year in the cinema with

,

and

three landmark films.

In

, he is Virgil Tibbs the imperturbable police officer suspected of murder in a racist southern town, an emblematic role that he will resume in two other films

(1970) and

(1971).

Courageous film for the time,

sees him as a mature man who comes to ask a 23-year-old white woman in marriage to his parents, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

At the start of filming, interracial marriages were still banned in 17 American states, a ban lifted that same year 1967 by the Supreme Court ruling in Loving vs. Virginia.

And in To

with love, he plays the role of an engineer who accepts to teach in a high school in the midst of a period of emancipation from the youth of

in the second half of the 1960s.

An exemplary journey

Sydney Poitier and Denzel Washington in March 2000. AFP PHOTO / Lucy NICHOLSON

At the turn of the 1970s, Sidney Poitier joined forces with Barbara Streisand, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman to create First Artists Production Company in order to have more elbow room than with the studios. He then embarked on directing, a field where his success was more modest than in front of the camera but in which he would take great pleasure, in particular that of filming twice with his lifelong friend Harry Belafonte in

(1972), a western, and

(1974), a comedy.

We are in the middle of the

period , genre films originally intended for black audiences only but revered by aesthetes, foremost among them Quentin Tarantino. In the same vein, he also toured with the very popular Bill Cosby

(1975) and

(1977) then

with the comedians Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, the third biggest box office success. American in 1981. He will be less happy with the following three films and will then devote himself to writing, him the former illiterate. He will sign

(1980),

(2000), two autobiographies but also

(2008) as well as

, his first novel, at the age of 86 (2013).

At the same time, he sat between 1995 and 2003 on the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company while exercising the profession of diplomat as non-resident ambassador of the Bahamas in Japan from 1997 to 2007 and to Unesco from 2002 to 2007, crowning of an exceptional existence which will have also seen him be made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974 and decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009. Sidney Poitier had four daughters - Beverly, Pamela, Sherri and Gina - from her first marriage (1950-1965) with Juanita Hardy and two others - Anika and Sydney Tamiia - with Canadian actress Johanna Shimkus, married in 1976.

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