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    TCM Tribute to Sidney Poitier Jan. 15

    By Last Updated

    Turner Classic Movies has a seven-film tribute to Sidney Poitier on Monday, January 15, 2024.

    Among the films in the tribute are In the Heat of the Night, which won Best Picture in 1967, No Way Out (1950), which was Poitier’s first film, and Lilies of the Field (1963), which won Poitier an Academy Award for his portrayal of a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel.

    Poitier died January 6, 2022, at the age of 94. The January 15 tribute coincides with Martin Luther King Day. The schedule for the Poitier tribute is below; all times are Eastern Time.

    January 15

    Also in January on TCM:

    More from TCM

    Below is a TCM retrospective of Poitier’s career.

    Sidney Poitier Bio

    Sidney Poitier KBE (/ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ PWAH-tyay; February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian and American actor, film director, and diplomat.

    On January 6, 2022, Poitier died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 94. Cause of death was cardiopulmonary failure, with Alzheimer’s disease and prostate cancer listed as underlying causes.

    Poitier in 2013 (By U.S. Department of the Interior / Wikipedia)

    Poitier was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida. He was the youngest of seven children born to Evelyn (née Outten) and Reginald James Poitier, Afro-Bahamian farmers who owned a farm on Cat Island. The family would travel to Miami to sell tomatoes and other produce to wholesalers. His father also worked as a cab driver in Nassau. Poitier was born unexpectedly in Miami while his parents were on business; his birth was three months premature, and he was not expected to survive, but his parents remained in Miami for three months to nurse him to health. Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, then a British Crown colony. His birth in the United States entitled him to US citizenship.

    Poitier lived with his family on Cat Island until he was ten, when they moved to Nassau. There he was exposed to the modern world, where he saw his first automobile and first experienced electricity, plumbing, refrigeration, and motion pictures.  He was raised Catholic but later became an agnostic with views closer to deism.

    At age fifteen, he was sent to Miami to live with his brother’s large family, and at sixteen, he moved to New York City, looking to become an actor, holding a string of jobs as a dishwasher. After failing his first audition with the American Negro Theatre due to his inability to fluently read the script, an elderly Jewish waiter sat with him every night for several weeks, helping him to improve his reading by using the newspaper. During World War II, in November 1943, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to a Veteran’s Administration hospital in Northport, New York, and was trained to work with psychiatric patients. Poitier became upset with how the hospital treated its patients and feigned mental illness to obtain a discharge. Poitier confessed to a psychiatrist that he was faking his condition, but the doctor was sympathetic and granted his discharge under Section VIII of Army regulation 615–360 in December 1944.

    After leaving the Army, he worked as a dishwasher until a successful audition landed him a role in an American Negro Theatre production, the same company he failed his first audition with.

    In 1955 Poitier landed his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955). In 1958, Poitier starred with Tony Curtis as chained-together escaped convicts in The Defiant Ones, which received nine Academy Award nominations; both actors received nominations for Best Actor, with Poitier’s being the first for a Black actor. They both also had Best Actor nominations for the BAFTAs, with Poitier winning. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), playing a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel.

    Poitier also received acclaim for Porgy and Bess (1959), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965), because of his strong roles as epic African American male characters. He continued to break ground in three successful 1967 films which dealt with issues of race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture for that year. He received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for his performance in the last film, and in a poll the next year he was voted the US’s top box-office star. Beginning in the 1970s, Poitier also directed various comedy films, including Stir Crazy (1980), starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, among other films. After nearly a decade away from acting, he returned to television and film starring in Shoot to Kill (1988) and Sneakers (1992).

    Poitier was granted a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. In 1982, he received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award. In 1995, he received the Kennedy Center Honor. From 1997 to 2007, he was the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. In 1999, he ranked 22nd among male actors on the “100 Years…100 Stars” list by the American Film Institute and received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. In 2002, he was given an Honorary Academy Award, in recognition of his “remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being”. In 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, by President Barack Obama. In 2016, he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding lifetime achievement in film.

    Poitier wrote three autobiographical books:

    For more details visit: Sidney Poitier on Wikipedia

    Sidney Poitier Film Trailers