Sidney Poitier's Reflections Of Dignity

Listening to Morning Edition host Renee Montagne's interview with film star Sidney Poitier, it was hard not to be left with the impression that Poitier was always playing himself in his movies.

The dignity and strong sense of self worth the now 82-year old actor always radiated while on screen, was evidently there from the very beginning, judging from a story he relates during the interview.

Poitier tells of being sent by his parents from his native Bahamas in 1942 at age 15 to Miami to live with his brother who found him a menial job at a local department store. But Florida was very much part of the Jim Crow South which meant it was a place designed to crush young black men with ambitions. So Poitier left.

As he explained to Renee:

"I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant that I decided it was not a good mix. I had never in my life my early life never been so described as Florida described me."

I think essentially Florida said to me, "You are not who you think you are. We will determine what you are."

And I decided, 'No, I will determine who I am,' And I wound up in New York. That's how I got started in the theater. And the theater went to movies."

So that steely determination not to be circumscribed by the arbitrariness of skin color is a very real part of Poitier's makeup. That probably explains why he was able to so convincingly portray characters who almost always defied the perverse racial status quo of the 1950s and 1960s. The characters sharply reflected him.

As a black kid when Poitier made his most iconic movies, films like "Lilies of the Field," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "In the Heat of the Night," I resonated to Poitier's depictions of smart, dignified and righteous black men. He wasn't the first black to win an Academy Award but he was the first whose screen work made blacks proud.

For those of us who are old enough, he was among the few high-profile black men in a position to provide us with a much-needed role model of how to navigate a world that was often less than welcoming.

Poitier is a kind of royalty that has nothing to do with wealth or fame and everything to do with the way he's lived his life on a very public stage, enduring the kind of pressure that would crack most people. It seems especially remarkable that an essentially shy person, which is how Poitier describes himself in his autobiography just out in paperback "Life Beyond Measure," could have accomplished what he has. This was a man from such a humble background that he never saw his reflection in a mirror until he was ten years old.

Melissa Jaeger-Miller, a "Morning Edition" producer who accompanied Renee to the interview, described Poitier's home to me as not especially lavish and on a regular street in Beverly Hills, if there is such a thing, not up in the hills where many stars live for the breathtaking views and status.

The home is filled with antiques and contains many decorative flourishes, befitting the abode of a man married to an interior decorator.

My favorite bit of color from Melissa is that a maid wearing white gloves brought bottled water on a silver platter to Poitier and the NPR journalists. Very Hollywood.