“Whenever there is a will there will always be a hill,” Sidney Poitier writes in his 1980 autobiography, This Life, “and wherever there is hope there will always be a chance.”
The pioneering, charming, and handsome superstar, famous for films like In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, A Raisin in the Sun, The Defiant Ones, A Patch of Blue, and To Sir, With Love, climbed many hills in his long life. He was more than an actor: He was a civil rights activist, diplomat, director, and all-around legend.
But the conversational This Life reveals that Poitier was also so much more: a brilliant, perceptive, funny, self-deprecating, oftentimes lighthearted communicator who told at turns hilarious and poignant stories about everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. to Quincy Jones, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Dizzy Gillespie, Tony Curtis, Dorothy Dandridge, and Eartha Kitt.
His philosophical, principled, sensitive nature is also evident in Poitier’s 2000 memoir, The Measure of a Man, a beautifully written book of musings from an ever-evolving elder statesman. As he once said: “If I’m remembered for having done a few good things, and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that’s plenty.”
Little Sidney P
Sidney Poitier was born in Miami on February 20, 1927. Premature and weighing less than three pounds, he was the seventh surviving child of his beloved parents, Evelyn and Reginald—Bahamian tomato farmers who had come to Florida to sell their crop. With her newborn failing to thrive, Evelyn went to a soothsayer who reassured her that tiny Sidney would do more than just survive. “He will travel to most of the corners of the earth,” the mystic insisted. “He will walk with kings. He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world.”
At three months old, Poitier was taken to the family home of Cat Island, which he describes as a poor, “preindustrial” natural paradise, where the tools for survival were taught early. “I was drawn to dangerous things,” he writes. “Ever since I can remember I enjoyed being scared a little bit.” Poitier believes this began when his mother threw him into water at ten months old, forcing him to learn to swim.
From the age of four, Poitier was “the captain of his own ship”—even if he was also dressed in clothes fashioned from grain sacks. He poetically conveys the magic of exploring the island, but also indulges in the earthy, raunchy sense of humor amply evident throughout his This Life, even telling one embarrassing tale of failed bestiality with “a good looking chicken.”
This simple life ended in 1937, when an American embargo on Bahamian tomatoes convinced the Poitiers to move to the capital city of Nassau. He was shocked to see running water, cars, mirrors, ice cream, and cowboy movies. After leaving school at age eleven, he worked manual jobs, lost his virginity to a sex worker (who gave him syphilis), and was arrested for stealing corn.
Worried about the temptations of Nassau, Reginald decided he had to get his son out of town, and put him on a boat to America. “For the first time in my fifteen years, I was on my own,” Poitier writes. “With a small, battered suitcase and three dollars against the world.”
A Rude Arrival
Poitier’s description of his first years in America read like a hero’s journey in a Greek epic, with tests and tribulations at every turn. While living with his brother, Cyril, in Miami, the teen was heartbreakingly introduced to the brutal, racist world of Jim Crow when he was harassed by the Klan for delivering a package to a white woman’s front porch. He was also assaulted by a corrupt cop for being in the wrong part of town.
“In Miami, this strange new society started coming at me …to hammer home its long established, nonnegotiable position … which declared me unworthy of human consideration, then ordered me to embrace the notion of my unworthiness,” he writes. “My reply was ‘Who me? Are you fucking crazy?…I’m a good person and nothing you can say can undo that. You can harp on that color crap as much as you want, but because of the way I was raised, I don’t have a receptor that’s gonna take in any of that.’”
Knowing he could not live under the South’s oppression, at sixteen Poitier ran away to New York City. During this “time of ashes” he occasionally slept outside (once in a pay toilet), worked as dishwasher, was shot in the calf during a riot, and joined the Army after being arrested for vagrancy.
In 1944, Poitier was discharged after pretending to be insane. Back in New York and looking for a dishwashing job, he happened across an ad for actors at the American Negro Theater. As he notes, he didn’t even know what a script was, and director Frederick O’Neal kicked him off stage with a sneer: “Get out of here and get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.”
“How the hell does he know I’m a dishwasher?” an ashamed Poitier remembers wondering. But as he walked the streets of New York, he decided to prove O’Neal wrong. “The sky’s the limit and I can be anything I want to be…I saw clearly that this was a crossroad and I had to make a dramatic choice,” he writes. “And I did. I decided I was going to be an actor.”
Against the Odds
With the help of a cheap radio to smooth his accent and a kindly Jewish waiter who helped him improve his reading skills, Poitier was soon accepted into the training program of the American Negro Theater.
Humorously self-deprecating, the infinitely curious and eager Poitier writes engagingly of his early career, including his Broadway debut in the bomb Lysistrata (where he forgot his lines, which made the audience laugh—and got him good reviews), his wild years touring the country with Anna Lucesta, and his mother’s reaction to his 1950 film No Way Out. (It was her first time at a movie, and when his character was hit by Richard Widmark, an enraged Evelyn stood up, shouting, “Hit him back Sidney!” )
Poitier also writes movingly of his growing involvement in the civil rights movement, under the mentorship of notables like Paul Robeson and Canada Lee. By the early 1950s, Poitier’s principles would lead him to be blacklisted. When he was offered jobs, he was pressured to sign loyalty oaths, which he refused.
He also refused to take parts that cast Black men in an ignoble light. Having recently opened a restaurant called Ribs in the Ruff, and with a wife and baby daughter, a broke Poitier was offered a role that while not overtly offensive, was passive and cowardly.
“Maybe it’ll sound a little sanctimonious even now,” he writes. “But I rejected that part, because in my view, the character simply didn’t measure up. He didn’t fight for what mattered most. He didn’t behave with dignity.”
In spite of, or perhaps because of, this strict moral code, his career began to skyrocket. But for Poitier, the heavy weight of representing Black folks and fighting for freedom caused him to place unrealistic expectations on himself and those around him. “I was being pushed to do the impossible,” he writes. “I figured that Black people just wouldn’t survive without me saving them through dealing with the pressures on myself. I didn’t think the world would survive if I didn’t live and develop in a certain way.”
Four’s a Crowd
Poitier admits that his first wife, Juanita, who he married in 1950, suffered the consequences of his tortured self-involvement. A former model, the kindly, open-hearted Juanita was content just mothering their four daughters, much to her intellectual, unsettled husband’s chagrin. “She was happy…For her it was a fulfilling experience,” he writes. “And she was never able to understand my turmoil.”
The stage was set for Poitier’s fateful meeting with Juanita’s polar opposite: actress and singer Diahann Carroll. She and Poitier met on the set of 1959’s Porgy and Bess. Poitier was soon enamored with the intelligent, witty, chic and fiery Carroll, who was married to music producer Monte Kay at the time. By the end of shooting, they had fallen in love—and in a bind. “We had resolved nothing except that we were in serious trouble,” Poitier writes.
Once home, both Poitier and Carroll told their respective partners what had happened. But out of guilt (and, though he leaves it unsaid, fear of harming their careers) neither made the move to divorce. Poitier moved to a bachelor pad in New York, and the beautiful couple’s passionate natures combusted. “Fights were satisfying—frustrating, but also satisfying,” Poitier writes. “I clearly got some sort of strange satisfaction out of being so frustrated, and she must have had similar pleasures, or we wouldn’t have fought so much for so long.”
Rumors of the affair eventually made their way to the Black press, and Carroll finally divorced Kay in 1963. Poitier followed suit in 1965. But as Poitier poignantly notes, as soon as they were respectable and free, a fight over their shared new apartment and living arrangements for Carroll’s daughter finally caused the relationship to implode.
Unlike so many stars (particularly male ones), Poitier is refreshingly introspective, taking blame for his mistakes, and openly wondering what might have been. “Two sets of active characters in two different camps set the stage against which my relationship with the wonderful Diahann Carroll spun itself into being across two continents, many countries, and dozens of cities over nine bittersweet years,” he writes. “Regrets? Yes, I’ll have a few.”
Tigers at the Gates
“Harry Belafonte will do you in, up, down and cross ways in a minute,” Poitier writes of his longtime soulmate-slash-frenemy. “You’ve got to be terribly special to him to be excluded from his guillotine when he’s out for blood. But if he’s there for you he’s there all the way.”
The two first met at the American Negro Theater in 1946, where Belafonte, the charismatic singer and actor, was cast in a role Poitier desperately wanted. Instead, Poitier was Belafonte’s understudy. According to Poitier, the first time they were alone, Belafonte fired the first salvo.
“I’ve heard about you somewhere,” Belafonte zinged. “Were you ever in jail?”
“No, I’ve never been to jail, but I will probably go to jail because I’m very hot-tempered and I will cut, stab, or hit somebody in a minute,” Poitier shot back.
Through their civil rights work, the two became like bothers—close but competitive. In the 1960s, Belafonte asked Poitier to travel to Greenville, Mississippi, to deliver money to Stokely Carmichael (later called Kwame Ture) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Though Poitier questioned the logic of two of the most recognizable Black stars in America acting as couriers, he agreed when Belafonte explained it would boost the morale of activists.
After the money was delivered and the SNCC fete was held, the two retired to a small home for the night where they realized that four of Carmichael’s men were patrolling the house with shotguns to keep them safe from the Klan (who did indeed briefly appear). Understandably, they couldn’t sleep.
“During these very tense hours Harry’s way of dealing with anxiety was the telling of weird, funny, spooky stories that had me falling out of bed laughing,” Poitier recalled.
But they would temporarily come apart during the planning of Martin Luther King’s funeral, when Poitier disagreed with Belafonte’s plans to hold a rally the night of the event. Belafonte stopped speaking to Poitier, and a stubborn stalemate lasted for two years until Belafonte called to pitch a film that would become Poitier’s directorial debut: 1972’s Buck and the Preacher.
“I believe I was wrong—if not in my challenge, in my timing primarily because I should have understood how particularly devastating Martin’s death was to Harry,” Poitier writes of their temporary estrangement. “I … am presently inclined to take all the blame for that painful two-year rupture (There, Mr. B, I’ve said it and that’s about all you’re going to get on that question. If you want more—write your own book).”
Living the Legend
Throughout his memoirs, Poitier describes the exhilarating but exhausting tightrope he had to walk for much of his illustrious career. Writing about his historic 1964 Best Actor Oscar victory for Lilies of the Field, he recalls sitting in the audience before his win was announced, sweating and cursing his luck. “I can understand this is an important moment and I have to be here and in fact I want to be here for what it means to us as a people,” he remembers thinking, “but I am never going to put myself through this shit no more.”
Yet it was all worthwhile once he had won. “It was bedlam, it was madness, but I was exhilarated by it,” he recalls. “I was happy for me, but I was also happy for the ‘folks.’ We had done it.”
Poitier gracefully pays homage to Black Hollywood actors like Hattie McDaniel who came before him—even when they took the sort of roles he refused to accept himself. He also acknowledges the unfairness and resentment borne of the fact that for many years he was the lone Black male matinee superstar, while thousands of other talented creatives were pushed aside by the industry.
A kind of peace seems to have settled on Poitier after he met Canadian model/actress Joanna Shimkus, whom he married in 1976 after the birth of their two daughters. “For the first time in my life,” he writes, “I was with a woman whose presence seemed to calm the turbulence in me rather than challenge it to battle.”
Poitier is a rare celebrity, one whose memoirs deepen a reader’s appreciation and awe of him—but also make one wish they could have a beer with him and listen to his awesome stories, both dirty and divine. He died in Beverly Hills on Jan. 6, 2022, wise and deep as his 94 years.
“I’m no longer young now, and the season for summing up is descending upon me with steady insistence,” Poitier writes in The Measure of a Man. ‘So no further spin needs to be placed on answers to who I am or where I came from or how I got here. I am what I’ve become. I came from a place of purity. I got here with the help of my friends, and my family, and perhaps the benign and protective influences of forces I’ll never understand.”
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