Word: poitier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...star in nine movies and his real-life love for more than 20 years, until his death in 1967. The evening featured her new documentary on Tracy (which will be on PBS this week). Following the recollections of such Tracy admirers as Frank Sinatra, Robert Wagner and Sidney Poitier, the 76-year-old Hepburn grinned broadly as she read off a list of Tracy's attributes, recorded when he first entered the academy: "Proportions -- good. Physical condition -- very good. Personality -- sensitive but masculine...
...Beverly Wilshire Hotel ballroom was filled by the 755 people who attended the $200-per-plate benefit. Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman were among those Hollywood notables on hand for the fete...
...dance routines. Next, omit acting, plot line and subtlety. Add violence to taste, Presto. You have concocted Fast Forward, this month's feeble effort at capturing on screen the ambitions and frustrations of those crary, but immensely talented, kids just have to dance. The only prestige that Director Sidney Poitier lends the film is his name in the credits. It becomes obvious, however, that it is not enough merely to import a big name to ensure cinematic success...
...Paul Robeson (too strong, too smart, too sexy, too damned uppity) and denied Lena Horne her best potential movie roles, as the mulatto heroines of Pinky and Show Boat, handing the parts instead to Jeanne Crain and Ava Gardner. It was not until the rise to stardom of Sidney Poitier in the 1950s that blacks had a bankable movie hero. "To this day," argues Film Historian Donald Bogle, "Poitier remains the most important black actor. The image he presented made white audiences take black Americans seriously, at least while they sat in the movie theater...
Outside the theater, blacks were becoming hard to ignore, and their impact was refracted on the screen. "When schools were being desegregated," recalls Danny Glover, a likely Oscar nominee for his performance as the hobo in Places in the Heart, "you saw Poitier become a film star. And in the wake of the Watts riots and the push for community control, you got blaxploitation." These were the low-budget gangster and horror movies that, along with prestige efforts like Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues, detonated the explosion of black films in the early '70s. Suddenly directors like Gordon...