A tribute to Sidney Poitier, with love.
To celebrate an actor of Sidney Poitier’s greatness should require no qualifier, no asterisk, though before he died ThursdayPoitier was the first Black man to win an Academy Award for best actor, a blazer of representational trails that forever reshaped the. His image exploded the world’s notions of whose stories were worthy of attention, whose presence could fill a theater, who could be called a movie star.
He was the schoolteacher who irresistibly whips a class of rough-edged London teenagers into shape in “To Sir, With Love” . He was the outsider unthreatening enough to win over his white fiancée’s parents in 1968’sHe could be a sacrificial lamb in dramas like “Edge of the City” , as a dockworker who pays the ultimate price for the lowly drifter who joins his crew.
As the film journalist Mark Harris wrote in his book “Pictures at a Revolution,” Poitier “demonstrated a remarkable instinct for self-presentation; without anyone to emulate, he knew exactly how much he could say publicly without jeopardizing his status in either black or white America.” What seems like deftness and nuance in one era, of course, can come across as timidity in another.
The story sounds like a template for many that would follow, including “In the Heat of the Night,” another story of a Black man whose professional authority threatens the dumber, meaner white men in his midst. But Poitier’s mesmerizing performance in “No Way Out”— it takes talentnerve to stare down Richard Widmark — never feels like a formulaic construct. It’s full of repressed pain, controlled fury and a wholly understandable, deeply human fear.
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