Sidney Poitier Popular Books

Sidney Poitier Biography & Facts

Sidney Poitier ( PWAH-tyay; February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian and American actor, film director, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first Black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a Grammy Award as well as nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. In 1999, he ranked among one of the "American Film Institute's 100 Stars". Poitier was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.Poitier's family lived in the Bahamas, then still a Crown colony, but he was born in Miami, Florida, while they were visiting, which automatically granted him U.S. citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved to Miami at age 15, and to New York City when he was 16. He joined the American Negro Theatre, landing his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955). Poitier gained stardom for his leading roles in films such as The Defiant Ones (1958) for which he made history becoming the first African American to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. Additionally Poitier won the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his performance. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963).Poitier also received acclaim for Porgy and Bess (1959), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965), because of his strong roles as epic African American male characters. He continued to break ground in three successful 1967 films which dealt with issues of race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, the latter of which earned him Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations. In a poll the next year he was voted the US's top box-office star. Poitier also directed various films, including A Warm December (1973), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), and Stir Crazy (1980). He later starred in Shoot to Kill (1988) and Sneakers (1992). Poitier was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. He received numerous honors including the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1982, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1995, Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1999, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2002. In 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2016, he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding lifetime achievement in film. From 1997 to 2007, he was the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. Early life Sidney Poitier was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida. He was the youngest of seven children born to Evelyn (née Outten) and Reginald James Poitier, Afro-Bahamian farmers who owned a farm on Cat Island. The family would travel to Miami to sell tomatoes and other produce to wholesalers. His father also worked as a cab driver in Nassau. Poitier was born unexpectedly in Miami while his parents were there on business; his birth was two months premature, and he was not expected to survive, but his parents remained in Miami for three months to nurse him to health. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, then a British Crown colony. His birth in the United States entitled him to US citizenship.Although there were few Poitiers of French ancestry in the Bahamas, some believe that the Poitier ancestors had migrated from Haiti, and were probably among the runaway slaves who established maroon communities throughout the Bahamas, including Cat Island. There had, however, been one Poitier of French ancestry on Cat Island planter Charles Leonard Poitier, who had immigrated from Jamaica in the early 1800s, possibly originally from Haiti. In 1834, following the abolition of slavery, 86 slaves from his wife's estate kept the Poitier name. Poitier lived with his family on Cat Island until he was ten, when they moved to Nassau. There he was exposed to the modern world, where he saw his first automobile and first experienced electricity, plumbing, refrigeration, and motion pictures. He was raised Catholic but later became an agnostic with views closer to deism.At age fifteen, in 1942, he was sent to Miami to live with his brother's large family, but Poitier found it impossible to adjust to the racism in Jim Crow era Florida. At sixteen, he moved to New York City, looking to become an actor, holding a string of jobs as a dishwasher in the meantime. After failing his first audition with the American Negro Theatre due to his inability to fluently read the script, an elderly Jewish waiter sat with him every night for several months, helping him to improve his reading by using the newspaper. During World War II, in November 1943, he lied about his age (he was only 16 at the time) and enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to a Veteran's Administration hospital in Northport, New York, and was trained to work with psychiatric patients. Poitier became upset with how the hospital treated its patients and feigned mental illness to obtain a discharge. Poitier confessed to a psychiatrist that he was faking his condition, but the doctor was sympathetic and granted his discharge under Section VIII of Army regulation 615–360 in December 1944.After leaving the Army, he worked as a dishwasher until a successful audition landed him a role in an American Negro Theatre production, the same company he failed his first audition with. Career Early work and blacklist Poitier joined the American Negro Theater but was rejected by audiences. Contrary to what was expected of black actors at the time, Poitier's tone deafness made him unable to sing. Determined to refine his acting skills and rid himself of his noticeable Bahamian accent, he spent the next six months dedicating himself to achieving theatrical success. He modeled his legendary speech pattern after radio personality Norman Brokenshire. On his second attempt at the theater, he was noticed and given a leading role in the Broadway production of Lysistrata, through which, though it ran a failing four days, he received an invitation to understudy for Anna Lucasta. Poitier would later befriend Harry Belafonte at the American Negro Theater.In 1947, Poitier was a founding member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), an organization whose participants were committed to a left-wing analysis of class and racial exploitation. Among his other CNA-related activities, in the early 1950s he was a Vice Chair of the organization. In 1952, he was one of several narrators in a pageant written by Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry for the Negro History Festival put on by the leftist Harlem monthly newspaper Freedom.His participation in such events and CNA generally, along with his friendships with other leftist Black performers, including Canada Lee and Paul Robeson, led to his subsequent blacklisting for a few years. Even associating with Poitier added to the basis for blacklisting Alfred Palca, the writer and producer of one of Poitier's earliest.... Discover the Sidney Poitier popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sidney Poitier books.

Best Seller Sidney Poitier Books of 2024

  • Hollywood Black synopsis, comments

    Hollywood Black

    Donald Bogle & Turner Classic Movies

    The films, the stars, the filmmakersall get their due in Hollywood Black, a sweeping overview of blacks in film from the silent era through Black Panther, with striking photos and ...

  • Sidney Poitier synopsis, comments

    Sidney Poitier

    Aram Goudsouzian

    In the first full biography of actor Sidney Poitier, Aram Goudsouzian analyzes the life and career of a Hollywood legend, from his childhood in the Bahamas to his 2002 Oscar for li...

  • Muse synopsis, comments

    Muse

    B. Michael

    “Friendship, love and a beautiful sense of togetherness sew together this gem of a book. B Michael...presents to us a portrait of a woman who was a rare gift to fashion and culture...

  • Not Waving But Drowning synopsis, comments

    Not Waving But Drowning

    Edmund Gregory

    Not Waving But Drowning tells the harrowing true story of one man's childhood struggle against poverty and his subsequent drive to become a policeman in the Royal Ulster Constabula...

  • The Measure of a Man synopsis, comments

    The Measure of a Man

    Sidney Poitier

    "I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I've suddenly come up with the answers to all life's questions. Quite the contrary, I began this book as an explorat...

  • Till Victory Is Won synopsis, comments

    Till Victory Is Won

    Janet Cheatham Bell

    Taking its title from the moving lyrics of the official song of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," Till Victory Is Won chr...

  • Life Beyond Measure synopsis, comments

    Life Beyond Measure

    Sidney Poitier

    The bestselling author and American icon offers lessons from his own remarkable life in the form of letters to his greatgrandaughterThe author of The Measure of a Man and one of th...

  • I Am Not Sidney Poitier synopsis, comments

    I Am Not Sidney Poitier

    Percival Everett

    I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in AmericaI was, in life, t...

  • My Life, as I See It synopsis, comments

    My Life, as I See It

    Dionne Warwick

    Dionne Warwick made her singing debut in church at the request of her grandfather, the Reverend Elzae Warrick, when she was six years old. No one knew then that she would become an...