The Actor Who Couldn't Read

Sidney Poitier, the first African American man ever to win an Oscar, acted in over 50 movies before his death at age 94 in 2022.

Some of his most notable films include Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Lilies of the Field (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor), In the Heat of the Night, and The Defiant Ones.

He is possibly best remembered for his performance in 'To Sir With Love' as an idealistic teacher teaching a group of rambunctious white high school students in London's rough East End.

Poitier is remembered not only for his significant contribution to cinema but, equally importantly, for breaking down racial barriers in Hollywood.

Growing up in the Bahamas, Poitier moved to America when he was 15 and served in?World War II as a teenager after lying about his age.

In the spring of 1945, an 18-year-old Poitier knocked on the door of the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, New York. The theatre’s co-founder, Frederick O’Neal, answered the door. Poitier pretended he had been acting for years. A suspicious O’Neal handed him a script to read from. It was then that everyone in the theatre realized that Poitier could barely read!

O’Neal told him, “You can hardly talk. You’ve got an accent. You can’t be an actor with an accent like that. And you can hardly read. You can’t be an actor and not be able to read.”

But the rejection only made Poitier more determined than ever to become an actor. It was then that he laboriously wrote down the simple but powerful words that guided and strengthened him for the rest of his life:

“I am the me I choose to be.”

For the next six months, he embarked on an incredible programme of self-education. In his biography of the actor,?Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon,?author Aram Goudsouzian?writes:

“While working as a dishwasher, he saved up for a radio and, trying to get rid of his Bahamian accent, mimicked the clean diction of the people in news bulletins and advertisements. He read any newspaper or magazine he could get his hands on. An elderly, bespectacled Jewish waiter he worked with helped him read and expand his vocabulary with copies of the?New York Journal-American.”

After half a year had passed, Poitier returned to the American Negro Theatre.

“He felt like a rank amateur,” writes Goudsouzian. “The other students read scenes from actual plays. Poitier brought an excerpt from?True Confessions?magazine. Worse still, he chose a love story and read out the woman’s dialogue! But it worked! The spectators’ jaws dropped. The auditioners then suggested that Poitier perform an improvisation of a soldier caught in the jungle, and so he did. Poitier was sure he had failed the audition, but his performance was so moving that he was accepted into the programme.”

The rest, as they say, is history. And all because he "became the person he chose to be."

We can do the same.

(Midweek Musings is taking a two-week break and will be back with you again on the 11th of June.)