Sidney Poitier Trivia
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46 free Sidney Poitier trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sidney Poitier trivia covers a life that reads like a screenplay: a premature baby born in Miami to Bahamian tomato farmers, a teenage dishwasher in New York taught to read by a waiter, a fake psychiatric discharge from the Army, a failed first audition, and then a career that broke nearly every colour barrier in Hollywood, culminating in the first Best Actor Oscar for a Black performer in 1964. This quiz follows him from the American Negro Theatre through No Way Out, Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones, the Broadway premiere of A Raisin in the Sun, the Oscar for Lilies of the Field, the extraordinary 1967 of To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and on to his second career directing comedies like Uptown Saturday Night and Stir Crazy. It also covers the honours: knighthood, Kennedy Center Honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a decade as the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan. Easy questions suit anyone who knows 'They call me Mister Tibbs!'; the expert tier is for classic-film devotees. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Poitier and his films, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which US city was Sidney Poitier born in 1927?
Miami
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.
Q 02Where in the Bahamas did Poitier grow up until the age of ten?
Cat Island
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.
Q 03Which 1963 film made Poitier the first Black winner of the Best Actor Oscar?
Lilies of the Field
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.
Q 04What is the name of Poitier's Oscar-winning character, a handyman who builds a chapel for nuns?
Homer Smith
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.
Q 05Which hymn do the nuns learn from Poitier's handyman in his Oscar-winning film?
'Amen'
'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.
Q 06Poitier's breakthrough film role was as a high-school student in which 1955 film?
Blackboard Jungle
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.
Q 07Poitier's 1955 breakthrough film is remembered as the first major Hollywood film to feature what?
Rock and roll music
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.
Q 08What was Poitier's film debut, a 1950 noir in which he played a doctor treating a racist criminal?
No Way Out
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.
Q 09In The Defiant Ones (1958), Poitier and Tony Curtis play escaped convicts who are what?
Chained together
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.
Q 10Who directed The Defiant Ones and, nine years later, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Stanley Kramer
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.
Q 11In the play Six Degrees of Separation, a con man charms rich New Yorkers by posing as Poitier's what?
Son
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.
Q 12Poitier starred in the 1959 Broadway premiere of which play?
A Raisin in the Sun
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.
Q 13Who supplied Poitier's singing voice as Porgy in the 1959 film of Porgy and Bess?
Robert McFerrin
Q 21Which singer debuted in To Sir, with Love and sang its title song, a five-week US number one?
Lulu
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.
Q 22Poitier took a small fee for the low-budget To Sir, with Love in exchange for what?
A percentage of the gross box office
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.
Q 23In A Patch of Blue (1965), Poitier befriends a white teenager who is what?
Blind
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.
Q 14What is the name of Poitier's Philadelphia detective in In the Heat of the Night?
Virgil Tibbs
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.
Q 15Who played the prejudiced Mississippi police chief opposite Poitier in In the Heat of the Night?
Rod Steiger
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.
Q 16Why was In the Heat of the Night, set in Mississippi, shot mostly in Illinois?
Poitier refused to film in the South
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.
Q 17What does Poitier's detective do when the plantation owner Endicott strikes him across the face?
He slaps him back
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.
Q 18Who performed the title song of In the Heat of the Night, over a score by Quincy Jones?
Ray Charles
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.
Q 19In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Poitier is engaged to the daughter of which screen couple?
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn
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.
Q 20In To Sir, with Love, Poitier plays a teacher in which part of London?
The East End
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.
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.
Q 24What was Poitier's directorial debut in 1972?
Buck and the Preacher
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.
Q 25Which comedy pair did Poitier direct in the 1980 prison hit Stir Crazy?
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor
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.
Q 26With which comedian did Poitier make Uptown Saturday Night, Let's Do It Again and A Piece of the Action?
Bill Cosby
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.
Q 27Poitier co-founded First Artists Production Company with Paul Newman and which other star?
Barbra Streisand
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.
Q 28Which company turned Poitier away at his first audition for reading the script haltingly?
The American Negro Theatre
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.
Q 29How did the teenage Poitier get out of the US Army?
He faked mental illness
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.
Q 30How did the young Poitier lose his Bahamian accent after a failed audition?
By copying radio announcers
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.