Engaged in the fight for civil rights, he had reigned, in the heart of the 1960s, on the American box office, including roles in “in the heat of the night” and “guess who comes dinner …” .
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For a few months, in 1967, the year in the heat of the night and guess who comes to dinner?, Sidney Poitie, dead Thursday, January 6 at the age of 94 in Los Angeles, was the first of Hollywood actors. The one who displaced the most spectators, the highest paid of all the stars.
One year before Martin Luther King’s assassination, a black actor reigned on the box office. This triumph was a trompe-l’oeil, an ephemeral victory whose fruit was waiting for decades. In a country that had barely recognized the right to vote at one of its most numerous minorities – African Americans of the southern states – the place occupied by Sidney Poitier in the collective imagination was immense, proportional At his talent, but also closely limited by the conservatism of a more likely film industry to preserve southern boycotts than to represent the spectators of the popular neighborhoods of big cities.
This paradox that opposes the vitality and creativity of a great artist with stifling conventions shaped the course of a son of a farmer of the Bahamas, arrived, teenager, almost illiterate in the United States, and became fifteen years later A sex-symbol that did not have the right to kiss his white partners, a star who at each film, seed of violence, in 1955, to guess who comes to dinner … had to embody the aspirations of his community such as defined written writers and directors. That this pressure did not prevent Sidney Poitier from affirming not only his quality as an interpreter, but also to become, in the 1970s, one of the first black producers and directors to work inside the studio system gives the measure of the man he was.
Chance determining
Sidney Poitier was born in a farmers’ family probably of Haitian origin, on Cat Island, in the Bahamas archipelago, then British colony. By chance that should be decisive, his parents used to sell their vegetables in the Miami market in Florida, and that’s where the young Sidney was born prematurely, on February 20, 1927, giving the American nationality.
In the early 1930s, the Poitier family is driven out of its land by the Great Depression and settles in Nassau, the capital of the archipelago. Sidney Poitier cultivates bad relations and collects the bad shots, to the point that his parents decide to send it to a senior brother, established in Miami where the boy arrives in January 1943. He discovers the segregationist laws in force in Florida, The prohibition of access to public gardens or commercials held by whites, the permanent threat of police harassment (Poice was chased from a white quarter under the threat of the weapon of a law representative), measures and unknown practices in the Bahamas. Just a few months for the teenager decides to leave the south for New York.
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