The career-altering role Sidney Poitier refused to play: “I had no money”
It would be hard to overstate the importance of Sidney Poitier being around as an actor in 1950s and ’60s America, who was making films as a leading man at the same time that some schools in the US were voluntarily closing rather than integrating students of different races.
Miami-born Poitier was so desperate to be an actor after moving to New York as a teen that he even faked mental illness to obtain a discharge from the army during WWII, and instead enrolled in amateur theatre groups, where he struggled due to being unable to sing. He could certainly act, though, and despite being blacklisted for associating with other Black performers, including the civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, he was cast in his first movie in 1950.
That was No Way Out, directed by All About Eve’s Joseph L Mankiewicz, and Poitier stood out in the story of a Black doctor forced to treat a racist patient. It led to his being offered several more roles, some of which he took on, but he was a father in his 20s with another kid on the way, and they were not well paid, which made the decision he made in 1955 all the more admirable, as he chose his beliefs over what would have been a sizable paycheck.
Poitier was offered a part in The Phenix City Story, a noir telling the real-life tale of the assassination of an attorney and politician in Alabama, which led to riots and the declaring of martial law. Poitier would have played a young man who witnesses the murder, only for people to try and silence him, killing his child, and despite the fact that the film went on to be seen as a classic of the genre, he turned it down because he didn’t agree with his potential character’s actions.
He told Oprah Winfrey, “This guy, an average person, his response was nothing. He didn’t do anything about that. And I told them that I couldn’t play that, because that man was a father. And knowing my father and remembering my father, I didn’t want to have that kind of record on my plate. I just simply decided not to do it.”
The fee that Poitier would have received was $700, the equivalent of almost $10k today, and as a father with another kid on the way, the money and exposure could have been transformational for the actor. He added, “At the time, my second child was about to be born. I had no money. I was working in a restaurant”, and instead, he used the furniture in his house as collateral to get a small loan to make ends meet.
However, there was a twist in the tale; some months later, the agent who originally offered him the role met him again and told him he was impressed by the way Poitier stuck to his guns in turning the part down. He offered to represent him, and he and Marty Bomb would work together for the next 50 years.
Later that same year, the actor went on to make the film that gave him his breakthrough, Blackboard Jungle, about life in interracial schools in America, in which he played one of the students. Now seen as a landmark movie, it brought in almost $10million at the box office, and Poitier was on his way.
Just two years later, he was nominated for an Oscar for The Defiant Ones opposite Tony Curtis, and then he became the first Black actor in history to win an Academy Award, for 1963’s Lilies of the Field, alongside which he was also nominated for six Golden Globes, the last of them coming in 1967 for the brilliant crime mystery In the Heat of the Night.
