![]() “But, as the cats say in my area, I’m out there wailing for us all.” That same year, he was nominated for an Oscar, for “The Defiant Ones,” in which he plays a runaway from a chain gang who is handcuffed to a white convict, played by Tony Curtis. “As I see myself, I’m an average Joe Blow Negro,” he told the Times. (Compare this with the endlessly publicized affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.) By then, he felt a heavy burden of representation. To maintain his squeaky-clean image, he took pains to keep the public from knowing about his years-long extramarital affair with Diahann Carroll, whom he met while filming “Porgy and Bess,” released in 1959. ![]() His characters were rarely able to show sexuality or anger. This was a vast improvement on the Mammy and Stepin Fetchit roles that preceded Poitier-and he had the megawatt charisma to pull it off-but it became another kind of trap. The film set the Poitier mold: a bright, clean-cut professional whose exceptional skill and equanimity make him “acceptable” in the white world, and who is often bound by circumstance to a racist counterpart. Mankiewicz’s “No Way Out” (1950), as a doctor caring for a racist white patient. Poitier, who was born in 1927 and brought up in the Bahamas, represented new possibilities. McDaniel had been typecast as sassy maids throughout her career, and the Oscar yoked her even tighter to a stereotype that was (fortunately) falling out of fashion. Until then, only one Black actor had received a competitive acting Oscar: Hattie McDaniel, for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” (1939). And I’ve tried many, many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl-a kid watching from the cheap seats, as my mom came through the door bone-tired from cleaning other people’s houses.” But winning the Oscar was a more complicated experience for Poitier, who was already walking a tightrope as Hollywood’s sole Black matinée idol (with the possible addition of Harry Belafonte), and its symbolism became more curdled as the decades passed. And I’d never seen a Black man being celebrated like that. I remember his tie was white, and of course his skin was Black. Years later, when accepting a lifetime-achievement award at the Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey remembered being a ten-year-old girl, watching from her linoleum floor in Milwaukee: “Up to the stage came the most elegant man I had ever seen. That Oscar, the first in the category awarded to a Black actor, cemented Poitier as the Jackie Robinson of Hollywood, a watershed moment for the Academy, for the movies, and for generations of Black audiences. The obituaries for Sidney Poitier, who died last week, at the age of ninety-four, inevitably led off with his 1964 Academy Award for Best Actor.
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