Sidney Poitier

by

Arthur Knight

• LAST REVIEWED: 20 April 2023
• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0101

Introduction

Sidney Poitier (b. 1927–d. 2022) was the first African American to be, inarguably, a movie star and, beyond that, an “institution” of Hollywood film and American culture. Poitier’s stature is such that in his autobiography Barack Obama recalls his mother holding Poitier up as a model alongside Martin Luther King Jr.; that in 2008 the New York Times’s film critics felt Poitier’s acting helped Americans prepare to elect a Black president; and that Quentin Tarantino sought his advice before making Django Unchained (2012), his controversial, violent action film about an ex-slave turned bounty hunter. Poitier was the first African American to win a major Academy Award (Best Actor, 1963; awarded 1964) and the first African American box-office top earner (1967–1968). His many other honors include an honorary British Knighthood (KBE, 1974), honorary Academy Award (2002), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). That Poitier would achieve such renown was improbable. Poitier’s first Hollywood role was in a social problem film, No Way Out (1950), which featured a brutal interracial melee and a jaundiced view of American race and class relations. But Poitier’s character—a young, aspiring, and dignified doctor—served to provide a glimmer of hope. Poitier’s portrayal made it clear that though his character was angry and had suffered from white prejudice, he would rise above past injustices and work toward a better future. With many variations, this is a character type Poitier repeated over the next two decades in films such as The Defiant Ones (1958), Lilies of the Field (1963), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). These roles proved influential and led to great success but also to criticism of Poitier as an overly safe and de-sexualized “ebony saint.” In the 1970s Poitier increasingly turned to directing and producing. Never lauded for his directing style, he nonetheless made some influential and successful movies, including the Black western Buck and the Preacher (1972), a trio of comedies that spoofed “blaxploitation” films, and Stir Crazy (1980), a breakthrough film for Richard Pryor and the first movie directed by an African American to earn more than 100 million dollars. After the 1980s, Poitier continued to act, often in character roles or in roles portraying civil rights icons—for example, Nelson Mandela in Mandela and de Klerk (1997), a made-for-television movie. In the twenty-first century, Poitier turned his attention to penning popular, introspective autobiographies and, in 2013, a novel. Poitier was a dual citizen of the United States and the Bahamas and served as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan (1997–2007) and to UNESCO (2002–2007). At his death in January 2022, he was recognized for his accomplishments in obituaries and tributes worldwide.

General Overviews

In film history and criticism, Poitier’s work needs to be seen in several broader contexts. Poitier has been examined primarily in histories and analyses of African Americans in American film, and these make up the bulk of the works noted in this section. Bogle 2016, Cripps 1993, and Guerrero 1993 provide pioneering examples of this sort of analysis, shaped by writers’ experiences of the “blaxploitation” wave of the late 1960s and 1970s and the rise of African American filmmakers such as Spike Lee and John Singleton and the explosive stardom of Bill Cosby (on television) and Eddie Murphy in the 1980s and 1990s. George 1994 covers this same territory from an overtly personal perspective. Haygood 2021 is the most recent book-length history of African Americans in US film, and Poitier figures prominently, and Mitchell 2022 is a documentary film parallel. Sieving 2011 provides a more narrowly focused and more analytically distanced view. The other context for Poitier’s career is the institutional history of Hollywood filmmaking. The most active and influential portions of Poitier’s career, from the 1950s through the 1970s, coincide with the decline of the “old” Hollywood studio system and the rise of “new” Hollywood (something all of these works acknowledge), so it is also important to consider Poitier in the framework of radical changes in the mainstream American film production, distribution, and exhibition system. However, few general, institutional histories of American film in this extended period of transformation pay sustained attention to Poitier’s career. Harris 2008 and Stratchen and Mask 2014 are useful exceptions. Quinn 2019 is the first study to fully consider race in the context of this institutional historical change, and Poitier is of course present (Quinn’s title is borrowed from a 1977 film he directed and starred in). Additionally, Poitier was first and foremost a movie star, and Walker 1970 and Bell 2016 consider him in that important context (see also Raymond 2015 in Harry Belafonte and Celebrity Politics).

• Bell, James, ed. Black Star: A BFI Compendium. London: British Films Institute, 2016.

  This lavishly illustrated compendium of short essays by journalists, artists, critics, and scholars documents and examines from many angles the history of the relationship of Black people worldwide to the phenomenon of film and media stardom and celebrity. Consideration of Poitier is woven throughout.

• Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. 5th ed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

  First published in 1973, this pathbreaking popular history recognizes Poitier’s “talent” but sees his roles and star image as primarily conveying “an old [uncle] tom dressed up with modern intelligence and reason” (p. 159).

• Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195037739.001.0001

  This important scholarly history focuses on Hollywood as an institution, its attempts to represent African Americans, and its responses to pressures from civil rights groups, government, and divergent audiences. Poitier figures prominently in the later sections of this story.

• George, Nelson. Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

  George, a music and cultural critic with Hollywood ambitions, examines African Americans in the movies through a strongly personal, memoirist lens. Provides a vivid sense of Poitier’s meaning to a young Black man coming of age in Brooklyn in the 1960s.

• Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

  More narrowly focused and nuanced in its understanding of cinematic representation than Bogle 2016, but broader in scope and more urgently critical than Cripps 1993, this book sees Poitier’s star image as limited but also crucial to understanding Black images in US film.

• Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New York: Penguin, 2008.

  Examines how Hollywood filmmaking changed in the late 1960s via case studies of the Academy Award nominees for best picture in 1968. Poitier starred in two of them, and Harris suggests that he (as well as issues of race) was paradoxically both marginal and central to the “new” Hollywood.

• Haygood, Wil. Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Film in a White World. New York: Knopf, 2021.

  Haygood, a journalist, biographer, and screenwriter (Haygood reported the piece that was the basis for The Butler [2013]), writes vivid popular social history of African American struggles to be included in—and, importantly, have some creative control over—American filmmaking. Poitier is considered throughout, but Haygood devotes a chapter to him and his best friend Harry Belafonte, both of whom played pivotal roles in this history.

• Mitchell, Elvis. Is That Black Enough for You?!? Online streaming. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2022.

  Critic and journalist Mitchell—one of relatively few African American writers to work in national outlets and make their living as a movie critic—combines documentary and memoir in this history of African Americans and film, which necessarily considers Poitier’s career.

• Quinn, Eithne. A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

  DOI: 10.7312/quin16436

  Carefully analyzes the changes in Hollywood’s labor practices in the 1960s through the 1980s, an era in which Poitier was both an influential star and director.

• Sieving, Christopher. Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

  Focuses on the movies of the 1960s, the period that marked the peak of Poitier’s career, that were not Poitier movies. But Sieving shows that these movies were often implicit (and sometimes explicit) responses to or attempts to complicate Poitier’s image.

• Stratchen, Ian Gregory, and Mia Mask, eds. Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

  A collection of essays that encompass most of Poitier’s film career, from its beginning to about 1990. Especially useful for several analyses of Poitier in an international, rather than exclusively US, context.

• Walker, Alexander. Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon. New York: Stein and Day, 1970.

  The penultimate chapter of this early study of Hollywood stardom, “Black Is Box-Office” (pp. 347–357), carefully examines Poitier’s stardom in the midst of changing times for the dominant American film industry.