It was pretty much how I am. I met these new kids who were in this particular neighborhood, and they sort of embraced me. I went in and I auditioned for them. Sidney Poitier: I was a delivery boy. The Bahamas became an independent nation in 1973. I was a dishwasher. So they had to go by sailboat. All the policemen were black, except possibly the head of the police department and his lieutenants. How did they get there? I still dont have a fix on it, but I do believe that there are forces in nature that we dont understand, and probably never will, that have an influence on our lives that defies understanding. I paid Beth Israel Hospital, and my baby was born. Sidney Poitier: No. It is not very bright. I said were in the 60s, this is 1968 or 7 You cant do that. I said, The black community will look at that and say that is egregious. Although he flubbed his lines on opening night, critics and audiences were charmed. Why did you need that scene to change? I would have to take 98-pound bags of rice or sugar or flour and stack them to the ceiling of this warehouse in town. Sidney Poitier rose to a position of international eminence from a childhood of poverty in the Bahamas, where he spent the first years of his life on a tiny island, without electricity or running water. Sometimes theJournal American, sometimesThe New York Times,Daily News. The Sidney Poitier New American Film School operates across three cities, including a brand-new 118,000-gross-square-foot state-of-the-art facility in downtown Mesa, Arizona, 7 miles from the university's Tempe Campus. And there were no available hospitals for people of African descent. He came backstage and he said to me, he said, Let me ask you a question. Now by the way, Im reading my lines better. Sidney Poitier, center, marches during the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., in May 1968. He struggled for a number of years, alternating work in theater and films with poorly paid day jobs. And that made the movie. If my mother was unable to work in the fields, her friends would come by and bring food. He met a girl, fell in love with her and she with him and they got married and he went down to the police station in the center of Miami and he told them that he was a stowaway and that he has been here such and such a time and he explained to them what he did. And this place had a faade that had pictures of people, white people, on the outside, which ultimately I came to understand were advertisements letting the audience know what the movie is about. Hes a massive, massive guy. You describe in your autobiography a sense of coming alive that you felt, as an actor, fairly early on, that the art of acting kind of electrified you. Just a few nights ago, you received the Lincoln Medal at Fords Theatre in Washington, with President Obama attending. What was that like for you? He grew up in poverty as the son of farmers, with his father also driving a cab in Nassau. Did you want to look behind the theater to see where they were coming from? At the time, the Bahamas, an archipelago of more than 700 islands and thousands of cays, was a colony of Great Britain. Then I saw cows and I saw wagons and I saw brown people wearing skins and feathers. I come from Burdines department store. She looked at me in the most amazing way and she said, Get around to the back. And I didnt understand, I really didnt understand it, because shes standing right there. I want to learn. And he said, I see. He says, Where are you from? And I told him. Sidney Poitier: Yes, she did. As a matter of fact, the evening I was born, the very next morning, everyone present but meaning the local people who were friendly with my parents, and the people who were not, they saw the child. 846 Sidney Poitier's Academy Award for the 1963 film "Lilies of the Field" made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category. And I realized then and there that what he said was his perception of my worth. She went out into the world, I suppose, figuratively speaking. But they treated each other respectfully, they raised their children to be respectful of elders. So I go in front of a camera with a responsibility to be at least respectful of certain values. Can you talk about that? So his complaints were dead on. This other character was a very wealthy, very well-positioned person in this community in the South. They have to. So my shadow became my friend. During the period when I was really, really close to not being here, everyone gave up on me. You are largely a self-taught person, and yet youre probably one of the most erudite, intellectual people in your field. She decided to stop in and visit a soothsayer. When box office receipts were tallied at the end of 1968, Poitiers films were the three most successful releases of the year. You know? I had no idea. He won this award for his portrayal of Homer Smith, an African-American worker in the film, Lilies of the Field. In To Sir With Love, he played a teacher assigned to a predominantly white inner-city school in London. I just took a handshake because hes the kind of guy, his handshake and his signature is one and the same. And on my way home, about 11:30, 12 oclock at night, Im on my way to my room where I had my residence, I decided to pick up the newspapers, and I picked up, I guess,The Daily News. And what it meant to me to receive the award for it, it meant a great deal to me. Its not that I am stubborn. I was making todays equivalent of maybe two dollars, three dollars a week. You cant do that, because the human responses that would be natural in that circumstance, we are suppressing them to serve values of greed on the part of Hollywood, acquiescence on the part of people culturally who would accept that as the proper approach. I said, You cant do it. I said, You certainly wont do it with me.. He was in his 50s, I would think, and the wear and tear of all his experiences with farming had weakened his back. I walked into the police station to get permission to go across the street, which was a vital statistics department of the government. The following year, he headed an all-star cast in a lavish film adaptation of the opera Porgy and Bess. So as a kid I didnt run around being fearful that I was going to be mistreated. And he said, Uhh And he takes his line, goes back and pulls up the response to this line, and it got all (mixed up). In that part of the world the sun is fierce. All they do is they bring this panel of human emotions with them. She obviously is the mistress of the house, and Im standing within three feet of her, and this is a big house. I was leaving the house one day and he stopped me. And I said to Walter, I said, You cant do that. I said, Let me tell you a little bit about America and the texture of American culture as it stands. I said, That is dumb. He got up, and he walked over, and he stood by the table thats next to the kitchen, and he said, Hi. And I looked up, and I said, Hi. He said, Whats new in the papers? And I said to him, I cant tell you whats new in the papers because I dont read very well. You were very close to nature as a child on Cat Island, werent you? I learned from him a certain way of behavior. And my mother had a different point of view. I wasnt gonna quit the business so quickly! 1996 - 2023 American AcademyofAchievement. Advertisement Sidney Poitier is one of Hollywood's most prominent names and pioneered the rise of Black actors in the American movie industry. Wherever she could find help, she would go. In 2000, he published a second book of memoirs, the bestselling. I worked for a place called Burdines department store. All of what I feel about life, I had to find a way in my work to be faithful to it, to be respectful of it. Poitier received his award for the leading role of a self-sufficient, independent black man, neither a servant nor a victim. He arrived in New York City as a teenager, nearly illiterate, but determined to make his mark on the world. Now mind you, I am 15 going on 16 now. Since that time he has also served as the nations Ambassador to the United Nations cultural organization, UNESCO. I had been experiencing it every day there, but the impact of it in such a coarse way! Having grown up in a virtually all-black society in the Bahamas, Poitier had never learned the deference that white Southerners expected. Ive been in Miami just a few months. Was that inLysistrata? Any experience? No. Well, they let me in. And every time it stopped, I was amazed. I was 12-and-a-half. And it fell like that, whatever body was making the determination. His parents had crossed the Florida straits in a sailboat to sell the tomatoes they raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Even though that was a very successful film. When we got to Nassau, it was somewhat different, but still. I would go around with a dipper and a bucket, and these guys were all working in the sun, you know. And I didnt want them to know that I didnt know what the word matinee meant. Not long after that, you went to New York City, on your own, with just a few dollars in your pocket. I said, I read the script, and I cant play it. And he said, Why cant you play it? I said, I cant play it because this is a father, and he has a child, and these guys kill his child to intimidate him. As out of place in the army as he had been in Miami, he feigned insanity to win a medical discharge. He became a member of the American Negro Theater and eventually found work in Hollywood. So their five senses are working, and theyve been working pretty much since they were tots. And thats theactorsjob, its nottheirjob. My parents were Bahamians, which is a group of islands off the coast of Florida. And I am making sure that I dont slip up and ask the wrong question or something, because I know that I would make a fool of myself. Im glad psychiatry wasnt around then. Wed like to go back to the very beginning now. I was respectful to people. What was there at the beginning, in my first experience in front of a camera, my first experiences on stage, was a totally dimensional awareness of life. Sidney Poitier Legendary actor, film director, and diplomat Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE, had a historic career in Hollywood, yet his work goes far beyond the big screen. Turn to page 28. Later that year, President Obama selected Sidney Poitier to receive the nations highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I didnt have very much of an education. I did learn early that everything I want to do in life requires that I accumulate understanding, knowledge, know-how. The overwhelming and well get to this as well the overwhelming majority of people in the Bahamas were black people. But they the other actors, because I didnt come back on the stage anymore after I walked off the other actors kind of righted the boat for them, and the play went on. The cops were black. Well my dear, being well, being, being, being I changed my mind. We are still quite a distance from Nassau. And the note came that I wasnt selected. I saw respect for each other, I saw laughter, I saw an embrace, I saw it was an environment that nurtured me in ways that I wasnt even aware of, so that I got to 15 not afraid of white people. They were six, seven, eight feet tall. I didnt know that there were places you can go and buy little books of plays and you can take a scene and study that and then use it as an audition. Shes washing our clothing in the pond. And I would sit there because everything else is done, all the dishes were done except those that the waiters are using for their snacks, you see. He has followed his successes as an actor with impressive accomplishments as a film director, author and diplomat. So what they did to seal my lips I had a child, the character had a child, little girl. And along comes this train. We had roads, but they were pathways in a way. My folks were able to rent a small house, again, with no electricity and no running water and all that stuff. So I understood what the words were. But I had seen everybody in this play not everybody, but most of the guys in the play going to a little peep hole and looking out in the direction of the audience. So I just kind of waited to see whats gonna happen with this lit up screen.
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