Sidney Poitier to Receive Marian Anderson Award
by Andre Soares
Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier play Siamese twins attached at the wrist in Stanley Kramer’s overbearing tale of ethnic equality The Defiant Ones (1958).
Via the [San Jose] Mercury News:
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Carrie Rickey writes a lengthy hagiographic article about Sidney Poitier, 79, who tonight will receive the Marian Anderson Award for his artistic and social contributions.
One brief quote:
"By 1967, he’d been in movies for 17 years, becoming the first black man to win an Oscar (for Lilies of the Field, in 1964). Then came Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Poitier defined civil rights in 16 words. His character, a doctor engaged to a white woman, tells his disapproving father: ‘Dad, you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.’
"Even one who viewed Poitier as the token that Hollywood pointed to when it wanted to congratulate itself for racial equality felt the seismic shift.
"’I had allies who were fighting the civil rights struggle,’ recalls the actor who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘I was fighting another battle in Hollywood, in an industry I tried to change.’
"And did. Not by throwing bombs, but by refusing to let the majority culture define him."
Indeed, the studios were the ones throwing (box-office) bombs at the time. But to say that Poitier, basically an actor for hire, refused "to let the majority culture define him" is a bit of a stretch. He didn’t write his own screenplays, and considering the dearth of leading roles for black men in American movies of the 1960s, it’s not as if he had a vast array of quality screenplays to choose from. (Admittedly, he may have suggested changes to his scripts — but the final say remained with the white directors and producers.)
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