During the first 50 years of American cinema, blacks were assigned the roles of maids, waiters, porters and cheerful slaves content with their lot. The great dancer, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, was only allowed on screen in his late fifties to dance with Shirley Temple; America's greatest black actor, Paul Robeson, had to come to Britain to find parts worthy of him.
Today, Hollywood is full of black stars - James Earl Jones, Danny Glover, Morgan Freeman, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, the list goes on. What happened in between? The answer is Sidney Poitier, who was both a beneficiary of, and significant contributor to, social change. Freeman generously acknowledged the debt he and his generation owed him when Poitier received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1992.
After the Second World War, Hollywood made biopics celebrating black-face singer Al Jolson and produced problem pictures starring white actors about blacks passing for white. Then in No Way Out (1950) Joseph L Mankiewicz broke the mould by casting the unknown 26-year-old Poitier as a black intern confronted by racist hoodlum Richard Widmark in an American city on the brink of inter-racial warfare. It was a strong role in a film so outspoken for its time that it wasn't shown in the South and was censored in some northern states.
The tall, handsome, quietly spoken Poitier gave substance to a saintly, forgiving character, whose banked-up anger was expressed through those hypnotic eyes that penetrate and interrogate his antagonists and his audience. This was the first of a succession of understanding doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers and cops that he was to embody over the next 20 years. They made him the first black superstar, 'an actor for all races' as one observer called him.
His three finest films of the 50s were Richard Brooks's The Blackboard Jungle (1955), where he was an angry but sympathetic pupil at a New York trade school challenging Glenn Ford as the representative of a prejudiced social system; Martin Ritt's Edge of the City (1957), in which he befriended a bewildered John Cassevetes on the New York waterfront and had a showdown with racist foreman Jack Warden; and Stanley Kramer's preachy but hard-hitting The Defiant Ones (1959), which brought him an Oscar nomination as a convict on the run chained to racist redneck Tony Curtis.
His best roles of the 60s were the sardonic journalist sussing out cold warrior Richard Widmark aboard a US warship in The Bedford Incident (1965), and Virgil Tibbs, the supercool homicide detective tangling with dim-witted Southern sheriff Rod Steiger in Norman Jewison's In The Heat of the Night (1967). But the movie that brought him an Oscar was Ralph Nelson's Lilies of the Fields (1963), a sentimental tale of a kindly itinerant labourer helping a party of East German nuns in Arizona.
Self-parody continued with Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a reductio ad absurdum of the earnest liberal movie in which Spencer Tracy has trouble deciding whether he'll allow his daughter to marry Poitier, a doctor of international renown with impeccable manners, on the point of winning a Nobel Prize. This smug movie appeared during the most contentious days of the civil rights movement and strident Black Power leaders called Poitier an 'Uncle Tom'.
But in 1957 he had become the nation's third biggest box-office star, and as he said: 'I'm the only Negro actor who works with any degree of regularity. I represent 10 million people in this country and millions more in Africa. Wait till there are six of us, then one of us can play villains all the time.'
Poitier had no memorable roles in the 70s and by the end of the decade had switched entirely to directing lightweight comedies of no particular distinction. But in 1988 he returned to the screen giving weight to Roger Spottiswoode's Deadly Pursuit as an FBI chief, and he followed this up with another pair of authority figures - a former senior CIA man in Sneakers (1992) and the deputy director of the FBI in The Jackal (1997).
But he figured most strikingly during the 90s in a movie in which he doesn't appear - the screen version of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, a dramatisation of the true story of a trickster who entered Manhattan society by posing as Poitier's son. This is a more potent tribute to his fame than his star on the Hollywood Boulevard.
Five classic movie moments
No Way Out
(1950)
In the final scene, Dr Luther Brooks (Poitier) is tending the gunshot wounds of snivelling racist gangster Ray Biddle (Richard Widmark), who's been baiting him mercilessly and stirring up a riot. He says: 'Don't cry, white boy. You're gonna live'
The Blackboard Jungle
(1955)
Gregory Miller (Poitier), angry black student, defies and provokes frustrated liberal teacher Glenn Ford: 'Come on! Go ahead! Hit me!'
Edge of the City
(1957)
Unintimidated black longshoreman Tom Tyler (Poitier) stands up to aggressive racist foreman Charlie (Jack Warden) on the New York docks.
Charlie: I can remember when they didn't let guys like you work around here. You know that hot shot?
Tyler: What kind of guy am I exactly, Charlie?
Charlie: A wise guy.
Tyler: Well, we sneak through now and again.
The Defiant Ones
(1958)
Black convict Noah Cullen (Poitier) foregoes his final chance of escape on a northbound freight train to help the redneck prisoner John Jackson (Tony Curtis) he'd formerly been chained to. He lights a cigarette for the crippled Jackson, cradles him in his arms, and sings a WC Handy blues song, 'Long Gone' as the sheriff and his posse approach.
In The Heat of the Night
(1967)
Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) is arrested for murder in Mississippi, brought before police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) and questioned about the money in his wallet.
Gillespie: A coloured can't earn that kind of money, boy. Hell, it's more than I earn in a month. Now where did you earn it?
Tibbs: Philadelphia.
Gillespie: Mississippi?
Tibbs: Pennsylvania.
Gillespie: Now what do you do up there in little old Pennsylvania to earn that kind of money?
Tibbs: I'm a police officer.
To sir, with love: Hollywood on Poitier
Morgan Freeman 'Every man has his one heaven and for me heaven has always been being in the movies. And always in my heaven, since I first started thinking about it, I've had one bright light, Sidney Poitier.'
Denzel Washington 'He's a pioneer. He's like the point man, he's the card that's out-front, and we've all sort of been riding in his draught. A great actor, a wonderful human being.'
Adrian Lester 'I suppose we should judge the measure of a man by his ability to deal with adversity. Sidney Poitier taught himself to speak English. He then went on to become America's number-one box office star at a time when black people were not allowed to go to the same schools or drink from the same fountains as whites. Poitier's achievements are beyond measure. He is the most inspiring actor I have ever seen.'
Robert Townsend 'For me I know Sidney Poitier represented hope because if this one man could have dignity, others could have dignity. He told me once that going into the studio it would be him and only the shoe-shine guy. What Jackie Robinson was to baseball, Sidney was to acting. If there was one person that represented, on a whole, a new image of African-Americans it was Sidney.'
Rod Steiger 'In spite of prejudice and the problems of trying to stay alive, Sidney Poitier moulded himself into an extremely important actor and citizen. One can only gladly respect him.'
William Greaves 'He redefined the way in which we perceived ourselves and the way in which others perceived us. Sidney was a tactician, he was a diplomat. He was someone who understood you couldn't always have everything the way you want it and that you have to sometimes horse-trade Whatever negative roles he may have played, the people have defined as negative, you will see a laundry list of roles in which he projected this positive, interesting, formidable persona which causes people of colour to feel good about themselves. If you look at the whole body of his work in Hollywood you've got to come away with the fact that he was a major contributor to the redefining of who the African-American is as a human being.'
Read Burhan Wazir's interview with Sidney Poitier here
