When Sidney Poitier became famous as an actor, producer, director, author, and ambassador, he fulfilled an unlikely prophesy made by a fortune-teller soon after his birth. Born two months prematurely in Miami, Florida, on February 20, 1927, Poitier was not expected to live. As author Carol Bergman wrote in her book, Black Americans of Achievement: Sidney Poitier, "Shortly after the delivery, Sidney's father visited an undertaker in Miami and came back with a small casket. Evelyn [Poitier, Sidney's mother], ignored his pessimism. Although she had lost other babies, she was convinced that Sidney would overcome his early difficulties. Not normally a superstitious person, she went to see a fortune-teller, hoping to hear something positive about her new son's future. From the depths of a trance, the woman told her, 'He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world.'"

This prediction seemed extremely unlikely, given that Sidney Poitier was born to poor tomato farmers from the Bahamas and grew up in obscurity on Cat Island and Nassau, where the family moved in 1937. The Depression had affected Bahamian farmers when the United States imposed an embargo on their produce to help boost prices in the United States. Unable to sell their crop, Poitier's parents moved the family to the larger island in hopes of finding work. It was here that Sidney Poitier saw his first motion picture and idolized such movie cowboys as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Tom Mix.

Moving to a large city after living on a sparsely populated island gave Poitier a different kind of education. After getting into minor trouble with the law, his father decided that Sidney should go to live with his brother in Miami where he would have a better future. In January 1943, the 16 year-old left the Bahamas where he had lived since the age of three months and returned to America. Here he experienced more than just culture shock; he had his first taste of racism. As an African-American with a heavy Bahamian accent in the Deep South, he found himself in trouble with the local Ku Klux Klan. His offense was delivering groceries to a white woman's front door instead of going around to the back of the house. Having no real grasp of the racial situation in the United States, he logically thought he should have gone to the front door. Later that day, the Klan turned up at his house, but luckily he was not home. Poitier left Florida that night and after a brief stay in Georgia, he made his way to New York City. It was as different from life in the Bahamas as on another planet - and it was also where he first saw snow and experienced the cold. He later remembered, "I was fractured, disoriented, almost immobilized. My feeble defense was to wear all of my clothes at once."

Before he was able to get a job as a dishwasher, he slept in train stations, on top of buildings under newspapers and in bathrooms. After being picked up for vagrancy, he lied about his age and entered the Army in November 1943. Instead of being sent overseas, he was assigned to a mental hospital in New York where he trained as a medical attendant. A few months later, disenchanted with the Army and not liking the way the patients were being treated, he wanted out of the service. Not wanting to admit he'd lied about his age, he pretended to be crazy so he could get out on a Section Eight discharge. It was his first acting job and he was convincing enough to be threatened with shock treatment. When he finally confessed to the psychiatrist that he was faking to get out of the Army he was discharged, miraculously escaping a court martial. It was December 1944 and Sidney Poitier was two months away from his eighteenth birthday. He was ready to find his true profession.

By now he was back to washing dishes and dreaming of better things, and when he stumbled across a newspaper ad requesting actors for the Little Theater Group in Harlem, he auditioned, despite having no experience. The director of the theater, Frederick O'Neal stopped his audition after a few moments, screaming that Poitier couldn't act and with such a heavy accent, he'd be better off as a dishwasher. It was a devastating blow to the young man, but after going home and giving it serious thought, he realized that O'Neal was right. He immediately began to improve his reading skills by reading the newspaper every day. Every night after work he would go home and listen to different radio station announcers and then repeat back what they said, imitating their accent. It worked. In April 1946 he auditioned at the American Negro Theater and won a place as a student.

When the theater put on Days of Our Youth, Poitier found himself understudying another young actor, Harry Belafonte, and was very unhappy about it. He felt he should have won the lead and that he had been discriminated against because his skin was darker than Belafonte's. But luck was with him: on a night when Belafonte was ill and had to miss rehearsal, Poitier was seen by James Light, a Broadway producer who cast him as Polydorus in an all-black production of Lysistrata. The play was a failure, as was Poitier's first professional performance. He was gripped by stage fright, forgot his lines and ran off the stage before he was finished. Incredibly, he received good reviews for his "comic" performance. When the play closed after only a few performances, the American Negro Theater hired him for their touring show of Anna Lucasta where he honed his craft for three years until he was spotted by a talent scout from Twentieth Century Fox. He won a film role opposite Richard Widmark and Linda Darnell in No Way Out (1950) and his career began to take off.

After receiving excellent notices in No Way Out he flew back to New York where he was immediately invited by director Zoltan Korda to come to London to make Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) co-starring Juano Hernandez, with locations shot in South Africa. Before going to London, he made his first trip back to Nassau in eight years to see his parents. There he found it hard to explain to his mother what he did for a living. Evelyn Poitier had never seen a motion picture.

Like most actors, Poitier experienced a period where he had trouble finding roles, and for a time ran a barbecue restaurant to support his wife and growing family. But in 1955, he co-starred in a NBC television production of A Man Is Ten Feet Tall which attracted millions of viewers in prime time and Poitier went on to star in the film version, Edge of the City (1957). The following year, 1958, he costarred with Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones which earned him a New York Film Critics' Best Actor award. More importantly, he became the first African-American to be nominated for a Best Actor award. He may not have won the award, but he was now a star.

The 1960s were Sidney Poitier's decade. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964 for Lilies of the Field (1963), starred in several top ten films such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and To Sir, with Love (1967). The 1970s proved more difficult. Films starring African-Americans were now moving into the "Blaxploitation" genre of more violent, sexier movies like Shaft (1971). Poitier's image had been (sometimes to his detriment) as a noble, heroic, and often idealized black man, one with no visible romantic life or sexual urges. His career went into a decline. He continued to make films, sometimes directing his own - Buck and the Preacher (1972) - but none were top-ten hits. He retreated to his home in the Bahamas for a few years before coming back with Uptown Saturday Night (1974) which he directed and co-starred with Bill Cosby. It was a hit. He later wrote, "The success of Uptown Saturday Night told me that black people wanted to laugh at themselves and have fun. They were weary of being represented on the local screen by pimps, hustlers, prostitutes, private detectives, violence, macho men and dirty words." The sequel, Let's Do It Again (1975) was an even bigger hit.

In 1977 Poitier decided not to act in another film until he could find the right material. His retirement from acting lasted ten years. He didn't appear on film screens again until Little Nikita (1988) but he did continue to direct. Stir Crazy (1980) starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, was the most successful film by an African-American filmmaker until Keenen Ivory Wayans' 2000 film Scary Movie. Other films he directed include Hanky Panky (1982), Fast Forward (1985) and Ghost Dad (1990).

Along with his sporadic return to acting, Poitier has also served on the Board of Directors at the Disney Company, and in April 1997, the Bahamas appointed him their Ambassador to Japan. He had fulfilled the predictions of the fortune-teller his mother consulted shortly after his birth. Sidney Poitier did, indeed, become rich and famous and his name has been carried all over the world.

by Lorraine LoBianco

Sources:

The Internet Movie Database

Black Americans of Achievement: Sidney Poitier by Carol Bergman, 1988

Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon by Aram Goudsouzian, 2004

* Films in bold type will air on TCM