Anyone with fair skin will hardly be able to imagine the burdens Sidney Poitier carried around with him, especially when she was still young - even where he seemed to move easily and elegantly over the scenes of his films.

He never acted just for himself or for the director, the production.

He always did it for his people, whom he had to represent, whether he liked it or not.

And which he hoped to go ahead.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the features section.

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The fact that he was the first black Hollywood star sounds in retrospect as if it was something beautiful and edifying.

Or as if he was just lucky.

That luck might be true.

But if someone is the first on such a path, then with every step they step into new, unknown and possibly mined terrain.

And if he didn't want to lie to himself, his people or the whites, then it would be best for him to take on roles that reflected precisely this state of the fighting.

Sidney Poitier's path to fame, an Oscar and an accolade through the British Empire was lined with feedback and blown fuses.

Neurotic sensitivity

Even if his many white admirers attested to him that he looked good, was downright a handsome man and was also so cultured - then that still meant in the sixties and seventies: for a man of his origin. No wonder, then, and not just the work of his scriptwriters, that Poitier's personal style developed an intelligent irritability, a slightly neurotic sensitivity, which Sinatra also showed as an actor. When he is arrested in Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night" and accused of murder, not because there is evidence, just because he is a stranger and black. And if it then turns out that he is a police officer himself and is far superior to the sheriff in terms of competence: Then the burden of proof is still on him. The sheriff beginsTo respect and like him, but always a big Though determines the relationship. The white man actually doesn't like black people. When the film comes to an end, it will be a long time before Sidney Poitier is just allowed to be competent and personable.

The most powerful film he has ever acted in is an almost forgotten civil war melodrama by Raoul Walsh. The film is called “Band of Angels” and Poitier doesn't even play the leading role. It tells the story of a woman who grew up rich and white. And when her father dies, it is revealed that she is the daughter of a slave. And so she too is sold into slavery, which is a catastrophe for her. Poitier plays a young man for whom this catastrophe is normal life because he cannot even convince himself that he is anything but black.

Sidney Poitier was from the Bahamas but was born while visiting his parents in Miami, which earned him American citizenship. He forged his date of birth to join the Army. And then he actually worked as a dishwasher until the American Negro Theater from Harlem accepted him into the ensemble. The audience, it is said, didn’t like him very much at first. He was unmusical, he refused to sing on stage, as was expected of someone like him.

The fact that the film career became something was because Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, had seen him and recognized his talent. What followed was, so to speak, a double-coded story: On the one hand, films like “No Way Out”, “Blackboard Jungle”, “The Defiant Ones” were always on his side, and the roles got bigger and more important over the years. And on the other hand, these roles always reflected the status of the struggle for equal rights and equal representation. And the cameramen from whose perspective you looked at Poitier stayed white. Hollywood also rewarded himself with the Oscar in 1964 for his role in "Lilies on the Field": for Poitier being allowed to take a few steps further in the direction of a normal acting career. But it wasn't until the eightiesin films like “Murderous Projection”, “Sneakers” or “Little Nikita”.

One of Poitier's greatest achievements was that the fighting had not made him hard and bitter - on the contrary, it was an undeniable philanthropy with which he then in the nineties his other country, the Bahamas, as ambassador first in Japan, then with represented by Unesco.

And there, in the Bahamas, Sidney Poitier has now died.

He lived to be a wonderful 94 years old.