“That could have happened with another actor playing the part, but it couldn’t happen with me.” “In the original script, I looked at him with great disdain and, wrapped in my strong ideals, walked out,” he wrote. Poitier wrote in his memoir “The Measure of a Man” (2000) that it was his idea for Tibbs to return the slap. In the movie’s most startling sequence, the prominent owner of a cotton plantation slaps Tibbs for not knowing his place, and Tibbs slaps him back reflexively. Poitier shoots back with a mixture of pride and barely contained rage, “They call me Mister Tibbs.” The chief, played by Rod Steiger, makes fun of the name Virgil and asks Tibbs what he is called in Philadelphia. The film marked the first appearance of a Black law enforcement hero in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Perhaps his most enduring and defining part was Virgil Tibbs, an experienced Philadelphia homicide detective who helps a bigoted White Mississippi police chief in a murder investigation in “In the Heat of the Night” (1967).
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Poitier, who championed colorblind casting, deemed as much a triumph as his Oscar.Īt a time when much of the country remained segregated, he struggled to find roles as professional and authority figures, saying that his primary intent was to portray Black men of “refinement, education and accomplishment.” By contrast, the film, about a drifter handyman who helps nuns from Central Europe build a chapel in Arizona, made almost no mention of race, which Mr. Poitier’s Oscar was for “Lilies of the Field,” a film released in 1963 - the same year as the civil rights March on Washington. Poitier “the towering American artist of African descent in the history of film” and likened him to the first Black major league baseball player, Jackie Robinson. He upended a demeaning Hollywood tradition of casting Black performers in vulgar caricature or limiting them to singing and dancing roles that could be segregated from the rest of the film and cut out when the movies ran in the South.Ĭornel West, an author, social critic and civil rights activist, called Mr. Poitier challenged audiences to accept Black performers in leading roles in movies and on television. Pamela Poitier said her father died at his home in California but did not provide further details.Īs a suave and dignified star, Mr. Mitchell, the minister of foreign affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Sidney Poitier, who was the first Black man to win an Academy Award for best actor and who forever changed the perception of African Americans in movies with his powerful and charismatic screen presence, died Jan. Washington Post (“ Sidney Poitier, first Black man to win Oscar for best actor, dies at 94“):