Sidney Poitier, the pioneering actor who died at 94, has been chronicled in The New York Times for decades. Here is a look back at some of the coverage over the years.
Jan. 25, 1959
“Bigotry — and poverty — were Poitier’s lot in youth,” The Times wrote in 1959.
His first audition with the American Negro Theater went poorly. He struggled to read the script, and his West Indian accent made him difficult to understand. So he bought a radio and spent hours at a time listening to the voices and training himself to enunciate words clearly. He also studied newspapers and magazines, and taught himself to read.
Ultimately, he was hired by the theater.
Read the article here.
April 15, 1964
“I guess I leaped six feet from my seat when my name was called,” Mr. Poitier told The Times in 1964 after he won an Oscar for best actor in “Lilies of the Field.” “You can call that surprise if you want to.”
In speaking about how he got to what The Times called “the pinnacle of stardom,” he said:
“I have always thought of survival in terms of my internal self. That is more important than external self. I wanted to be, in my own terms, worthwhile. I wanted to be acceptable to myself. And I felt that way in acting.”
Read the article here.
Feb. 28, 1989
Twenty-five years later, Mr. Poitier looked back at how his career had progressed.
By 1989, his film characters had included the streetwise student of “Blackboard Jungle”; the proper, collected schoolteacher of “To Sir, With Love”; the restless, frustrated Walter Lee Younger of “A Raisin in the Sun” (a role he created on Broadway); and the methodical but outspoken detective Virgil Tibbs of “In the Heat of the Night.”
“The most memorable and enduring of those roles embodied the experience of many Black Americans: an abiding faith in the country’s institutions, coupled with frustration and anger directed at those same institutions,” The Times wrote.
“Historical circumstances have changed,” Mr. Poitier said. “During the period when I was the only person here — no Bill Cosby, no Eddie Murphy, no Denzel Washington — I was carrying the hopes and aspirations of an entire people. I had no control over content, no creative leverage except to refuse to do a film, which I often did.”
“I had to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual fans. It was a terrific burden.”
Read the article here.
April 16, 2000
The New York Times Magazine marveled at Mr. Poitier’s diet — at age 73, he had sworn off alcohol, red meat, milk and sugar, referring to an occasional scoop of ice cream as “falling off the wagon.”
The Times wrote: “He is 6-foot-3, 200 pounds, trim, fit and still smiling the incandescent smile that started his career five decades ago.”
Read the article here.
