He was 94 and was the star of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Inspector Tibbs’ hot night”
today we can applaud the stars of the new black power of Hollywood like Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy and Samuel Jackson, we owe it to the skill and perseverance of an actor like Sidney Poitier (and even before Harry Belafonte) who died yesterday at 94, leaving six children of two different wives. But above all leaving, in an era when it was not easy for African Americans to get into the Oscar nominations, a career full of moral successes, such as the presidential medal of freedom given to him by Obama in 2009. And the two Oscars, including which the first won by a black actor for The lilies of the field by Ralph Nelson, melodrama in which the worker Sidney helps the nuns in the construction of a chapel, and then the career one in 2002. A long career in which he also obtained 10 Golden Globes and awards in international festivals (2 Silver Bears in Berlin) in addition to the tangible complicity of the liberal public of the 60s who made him the hero of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? by Kramer e Inspector Tibbs’ hot night with Rod Steiger, by Norman Jewison, all not by chance in ’67, a preface to an eventful era.
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Born February 20, 1927 in Miami, Florida, but a Bahamian citizen, Poitier grew up on Cate Island, at the age of 13 he left school for work and to help a needy family. At 16, he moves to New York with three dollars in his pocket, works as a dishwasher in Harlem, sleeps in a bus depot and tries unsuccessfully to audition at the American Negro Theater. He studies acting, until in 49, lying and raising his true age, he debuts in White man you will live by Mankiewicz, followed by two hot titles like The mud wall in ’58 by Stanley Kramer e The seed of violence by Richard Brooks (who will also direct it in Something worthwhile), with Glenn Ford teaching a thug class at the advent of rock, as well as the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess directed by Otto Preminger. Practically it is the generation of directors engaged in the anti-racist cause in those years heirs of McCarthyism but strong of the Kennedian reforms, including Martin Ritt (Paris blues) e Life runs on the wire by Sidney Pollack in which she shares a life-saving phone call with Anne Bancroft. Throughout its history it has contributed to breaking down the barriers of racism: with a wide faculty of metaphor in the Mud wall in which he is a runaway inmate tied with a chain to white Tony Curtis in a confrontation of prejudice in the swamps of Louisiana.
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But the fundamental chapter of this struggle for civil rights it was the role of doctor John Prentice, the boyfriend of a white girl from the liberal family of Spencer Tracy and the Oscar Katharine Hepburn in the progressive comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, portrait of a young black bourgeois (this is the novelty, the social conquest) who even leaves a cent to future in-laws for making a phone call. Poitier is now a recognized star and another cult film is in ’67 Inspector Tibbs’ hot night by Norman Jewison (with two sequels), almost a detective series in which Poitier is Inspector Virgil Tibbs alongside Rod Steiger, who won one of the 5 Oscars. In the 70s, he loses a little the halo of the hero of the just cause and launches himself without much success in directing, also directing a trilogy with his friend Bill Cosby. It reappears on the screens after 10 years, in 1988, in On the trail of the killer of Spottiswoode and then in the criminal gang of Lords of the scam by Robinson, with Redford, in which the roles of good and bad are confused, while the last direction is Ghost dad from ’91
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January 7, 2022 (change January 7, 2022 | 23:33)
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