Sidney Poitier, Actor, Was Also the Celebrated Author of “The Measure of a Man”

Sidney L. Poitier, iconic actor, activist, and guiding light for generations, lived a life big enough to fill ten memoirs—though he only graced the world with two.

Born on February 20, 1927, to Bahamian parents who grew and exported tomatoes, he was the youngest of nine children, and never saw a car or looked in a mirror until he was 10, when his family moved from Cat Island to Nassau. After dropping out of school at age 12 to work as a water boy for laborers, he was sent to live with a married brother in Miami. He stayed less than a year, making his way to New York, where he lied about his age in order to enlist in the army in 1943. He faked a mental disorder and was discharged in 1945, after which he joined the American Negro Theater and made his film debut in No Way Out in 1949.

The rest is history: With Lillies in the Field, Poitier in 1963 became the first African American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. He went on to star in plays on Broadway and to make some 40 films, including The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Blackboard Jungle, among many others. And he was always conscious of racism and inequality, both in terms of his lifelong civil rights activism and in terms of the roles he played—or chose not to play.

In 1980, Poitier published his first memoir, This Life, in which, among other topics, he explains how Samuel Goldwyn coerced him into playing Porgy in Porgy and Bess, a role he was adamant he didn’t want. If he hadn’t accepted that role, he writes, he wouldn’t have been given the role he desperately wanted, in The Defiant Ones.

He published another memoir, The Measure of a Man, in 2000, which Oprah loved and selected for Oprah’s Book Club. When introducing Poitier, who rarely did television interviews, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah called the book “eloquent, thought-provoking, lovely...so beautifully written.”

Here, we honor and commemorate Sidney Poitier, author.