46 Fun Facts About Sidney Poitier

In which US city was Sidney Poitier born in 1927?

Miami was an accident of timing: his Bahamian parents had sailed over to sell their tomato crop when he arrived prematurely, and the birthplace made him a US citizen.

Where in the Bahamas did Poitier grow up until the age of ten?

Cat Island, where his family farmed tomatoes, was home until he was ten. Only after the move to Nassau did he see his first car, or his own face in a mirror.

Which 1963 film made Poitier the first Black winner of the Best Actor Oscar?

Lilies of the Field was shot in Arizona in fourteen days on a shoestring budget, yet it brought Poitier the Oscar, handed over by Anne Bancroft in April 1964.

What is the name of Poitier's Oscar-winning character, a handyman who builds a chapel for nuns?

Homer Smith is an itinerant handyman who stops for water at a desert farm run by East German nuns. Their Mother Superior is convinced God sent him, and talks him into building their chapel.

Which hymn do the nuns learn from Poitier's handyman in his Oscar-winning film?

'Amen' is the gospel song the handyman teaches the nuns, but the voice is not Poitier's. Jester Hairston, who arranged it for the film, dubbed his singing.

Poitier's breakthrough film role was as a high-school student in which 1955 film?

Blackboard Jungle cast Poitier, by then in his late twenties, as the teenager Gregory Miller, a rebellious pupil whom Glenn Ford's new teacher persuades to stay in school.

Poitier's 1955 breakthrough film is remembered as the first major Hollywood film to feature what?

Rock and roll music entered mainstream cinema with its opening credits, which run over Bill Haley and His Comets' 'Rock Around the Clock'; the song then topped the US charts and teenage audiences rioted at some screenings.

What was Poitier's film debut, a 1950 noir in which he played a doctor treating a racist criminal?

No Way Out cast Poitier as Luther Brooks, a young doctor baited by Richard Widmark's wounded bigot. Off screen the two became firm friends, and they acted together twice more.

In The Defiant Ones (1958), Poitier and Tony Curtis play escaped convicts who are what?

Chained together at the wrist, the two fugitives have to cooperate to get away. Off screen, Curtis insisted that Poitier share top billing above the title.

Who directed The Defiant Ones and, nine years later, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Stanley Kramer produced and directed both of these 'message pictures'. On The Defiant Ones he hired a blacklisted writer under a pseudonym, and the script won an Oscar.

In the play Six Degrees of Separation, a con man charms rich New Yorkers by posing as Poitier's what?

Son is the lie, and it came from life: in 1983 David Hampton talked his way into wealthy Manhattan homes with the same story. The real Poitier had six daughters.

Poitier starred in the 1959 Broadway premiere of which play?

A Raisin in the Sun struck investors as a risky bet, yet it ran on Broadway for more than a year. The title comes from a Langston Hughes poem about a dream deferred.

Who supplied Poitier's singing voice as Porgy in the 1959 film of Porgy and Bess?

Robert McFerrin, a Metropolitan Opera baritone and the father of Bobby McFerrin, sang the role off screen. Poitier had turned the part down and gave in only under pressure from the producer, Samuel Goldwyn.

What is the name of Poitier's Philadelphia detective in In the Heat of the Night?

Virgil Tibbs is a Philadelphia homicide detective passing through Sparta, Mississippi, who is arrested at the railway station on suspicion of murder and then asked to help solve it.

Who played the prejudiced Mississippi police chief opposite Poitier in In the Heat of the Night?

Rod Steiger won the Best Actor Oscar as Chief Gillespie, one of the film's five Academy Awards, which included Best Picture. Poitier was not even nominated.

Why was In the Heat of the Night, set in Mississippi, shot mostly in Illinois?

Poitier refused to film in the South, telling the director he would not work below the Mason-Dixon line after a brush with white racists in Mississippi. Sparta, Illinois stood in for the town.

What does Poitier's detective do when the plantation owner Endicott strikes him across the face?

He slaps him back at once. Poitier said he took the part only after the producer promised that the blow would stay in every print, including those shown in the South.

Who performed the title song of In the Heat of the Night, over a score by Quincy Jones?

Ray Charles sang the title song that Quincy Jones composed for the film. The two had been friends since their teens, when both were unknown musicians working around Seattle.

In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Poitier is engaged to the daughter of which screen couple?

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn played the parents in the last of their nine films together. Tracy was seriously ill during the shoot and died within weeks of finishing his scenes.

In To Sir, with Love, Poitier plays a teacher in which part of London?

The East End was where the book's author, Braithwaite, had really taught. A Cambridge-trained physicist from British Guiana, he took the classroom job only after his other applications came to nothing.

Which singer debuted in To Sir, with Love and sang its title song, a five-week US number one?

Lulu took the song to number one in America for five weeks. In Britain, her home market, it was released only as a B-side.

Poitier took a small fee for the low-budget To Sir, with Love in exchange for what?

A percentage of the gross box office, 10 percent, was his price for taking a small fee. The film cost about $640,000 and became one of 1967's biggest hits, so the gamble paid off handsomely.

In A Patch of Blue (1965), Poitier befriends a white teenager who is what?

Blind since childhood, Selina befriends the kind stranger in the park without knowing he is Black. MGM cut the pair's kiss from prints shown in the South.

What was Poitier's directorial debut in 1972?

Buck and the Preacher, a Western about freed slaves heading west after the Civil War, became Poitier's directing debut when he took over from Joseph Sargent a few days into shooting; Ruby Dee co-starred.

Which comedy pair did Poitier direct in the 1980 prison hit Stir Crazy?

Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor play two New Yorkers who take a job dancing in woodpecker costumes, and get 125 years when thieves rob a bank in the same suits. Poitier stayed behind the camera.

With which comedian did Poitier make Uptown Saturday Night, Let's Do It Again and A Piece of the Action?

Bill Cosby co-starred in all three comedies, which Poitier also directed; in Uptown Saturday Night they play a factory worker and a cab driver chasing a stolen winning lottery ticket.

Poitier co-founded First Artists Production Company with Paul Newman and which other star?

Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman and Poitier formed First Artists in 1969 to control their own films, fifty years after Chaplin and Pickford did the same with United Artists. Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman joined later.

Which company turned Poitier away at his first audition for reading the script haltingly?

The American Negro Theatre in Harlem threw him out and told him to get a job as a dishwasher. An elderly Jewish waiter at the restaurant where he worked then sat with him night after night, teaching him to read from the newspaper.

How did the teenage Poitier get out of the US Army?

He faked mental illness to win his discharge, having lied about his age to enlist at 16. He had joined up to escape the cold of a New York winter.

How did the young Poitier lose his Bahamian accent after a failed audition?

By copying radio announcers, repeating what he heard on a set he had bought for the purpose. Six months after being turned away, he auditioned again and was accepted.

Which lifelong friend did Poitier meet at the Harlem theatre company where he trained?

Harry Belafonte also handed his friend a first break. When he failed to appear in a student production, Poitier went on in his place and was spotted for a Broadway role.

Which honour did Queen Elizabeth II grant Poitier in 1974?

An honorary knighthood came in 1974, a year after the Bahamas won independence from Britain. Across the Commonwealth, and above all at home in the Bahamas, he became known as Sir Sidney.

Which country did Poitier serve as ambassador to for the Bahamas from 1997 to 2007?

Japan was his posting for ten years, though as a non-resident ambassador he never lived there. He could represent the Bahamas because he held its citizenship alongside his American one.

Which US president awarded Poitier the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Barack Obama presented it in the East Room in August 2009, borrowing a line a New York Times critic wrote in 1969: Sidney Poitier does not make movies, he makes milestones.

Who became the second Black actor to win Best Actor on the night Poitier got his Honorary Oscar in 2002?

Denzel Washington won for Training Day at the March 2002 ceremony, the same night Halle Berry became the first Black Best Actress; from the stage he told Poitier, 'I'll always be chasing you, Sidney.'

Poitier spent nearly a decade on the board of directors of which entertainment giant?

Walt Disney elected him a director in 1994. The seat later landed him in court: shareholders sued the board over Michael Ovitz's severance, and Poitier took the stand at the 2004 trial, which the directors won.

Which actress, his co-star in The Lost Man, did Poitier marry in 1976?

Joanna Shimkus, a Canadian actress, met him on the 1969 thriller and stayed married to him until his death in 2022. Life was following art: in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner his character's engagement to a white woman stuns her parents.

Poitier's 1964 spoken-word album set which philosopher's dialogues to a jazz score?

Plato's dialogues, read over a jazz score, filled the album Poitier Meets Plato. Some twenty years earlier its reader had failed an audition because he could barely read.

Which 1992 caper film saw Poitier star alongside Robert Redford and Dan Aykroyd?

Sneakers cast him as an ex-CIA man on Robert Redford's team, hired by banks to break in and test their security. The plot turns when they steal a device that can crack any code.

Which leader did Poitier play in a 1997 television film?

Nelson Mandela, opposite Michael Caine as President de Klerk, in Mandela and de Klerk. Back in 1975 the same two actors had played fugitives from South Africa's security police in The Wilby Conspiracy.

Which Poitier book was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2007?

The Measure of a Man is a memoir he published in 2000. Winfrey recalled watching on television as a little girl when he won his Oscar, and said she had never seen a Black man celebrated like that.

Poitier had to enter apartheid South Africa as his director's indentured servant to shoot which film?

Cry, the Beloved Country, from Alan Paton's novel, cast him as a young priest beside Canada Lee. The ruse got both actors in, and the weeks they then spent living under apartheid opened his eyes politically.

Which actress, his co-star in Paris Blues, had a nine-year affair with the married Poitier?

Diahann Carroll met him while filming Porgy and Bess, when both were married to other people. In Paris Blues the two played lovers on screen while their real affair ran, on and off, behind the camera.

Poitier's 1980 memoir This Life won which book prize for African American authors?

The Coretta Scott King Award is given by American librarians for books for children and young adults. In 1981 the winner was not a picture book or a teen novel but a film star's candid life story.

Poitier was also the Bahamas' ambassador to which international body?

UNESCO, the United Nations' cultural agency, was a second posting held alongside his first. He had grown up poor on a tomato farm when the Bahamas were still a British colony, and ended up speaking for the independent nation.

In which 1991 TV film did Poitier play the civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall?

Separate but Equal follows the NAACP lawyer who argued the school segregation case before the Supreme Court and won. In 1967, thirteen years after the ruling, Marshall took a seat on that same court.