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Poitier, the Pathfinder
| Article
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20455 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
2,089 Words |
| Author
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Frank Thompson
Frank Thompson is the associate producer of Wild Bill
Wellman: A Hollywood Maverick, which airs this spring on
Turner Network Television. He is the author of Lost Films,
recently published by Citadel Press, and William A.
Wellman. |
His characters tend to be men of control, men who subdue volcanic rage with reason and intellect. But in virtually all of Sidney Poitier's performances, that anger simmers close to the surface. His jaw clenches, those remarkable, piercing eyes flash with fury, and his voice lowers to a strained, aching whisper. In Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967) redneck Sheriff Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger), in a voice dripping with condescension, asks him, "What do they call you up in Philadelphia, Virgil?" and he replies, in a measured tone that suggests barely capped dynamite, "They call me Mr. Tibbs." It is a moment of summation for Poitier, filled with what George Stevens, Jr., who directed him in Separate but Equal (1991), calls his "dignity, strength, and quiet sense of outrage."
One might assume that off-screen Poitier would be similarly earnest, serious, and impassioned. And one would be right, except for the notable addition of the laughter--loud and hearty and filled with pleasure--that punctuates his conversation. It isn't that he fills his talk with jokes or self-conscious witticisms, but that he finds the human experience so rich and (sometimes) absurd that the only response is hilarity. His laughter is rueful when he talks about his own dim chances for success when he started out in the forties, and wicked when he pokes fun at his lifelong friend Harry Belafonte. But no matter the context, the laughter is always there, proof that Sidney Poitier has come through decades of both stress and success in his chosen profession and emerged a truly happy man.
There was not always reason to believe that things would turn out so well. When Poitier appeared in his first feature film, No Way Out (1950), opportunities for black actors were limited at best. His success in the following years, including an Academy Award nomination in 1958 for The Defiant Ones and an Academy Award in 1963 for Lilies of the Field, almost singlehandedly created new possibilities for black artists in front of and behind the camera.
"He's a pathfinder," says Stevens. "He carried himself with such integrity through the years. When we were casting Separate but Equal, so many black actors were so eager to be in that film because, for so many of them, Sidney was the reason they were actors. And they weren't kids; some of them were men in their forties and fifties."
People don't talk about many actors in this way; Poitier has had to carry a heavier load of social significance than just about any other actor in history. In well over forty feature
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