Sidney Poitier

Trivia of Sidney Poitier (20 February 1927 - 6 January 2022)

*In 1927 his family was visiting Miami from the Bahamas and he was born unexpectedly- making him a US citizen by automatically. He was 3 months premature and was not expected to live.

*When he came to New York from the Caribbean to become an actor, he was so impoverished at first that he slept in the bus station. To get his first major role in No Way Out (1950), he lied to director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and told him he was 27, when actually only 22 years old.

*In the 1960s, for many of his films, he was paid in a way known as "dollar one participation" which basically means he begins collecting a cut of the film's gross from the first ticket sold.

*Despite starring in three of his greatest critical and commercial successes all in the same year (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and To Sir, with Love (1967)) Poitier was not a Best Actor Oscar nominee for 1967. One theory is that votes were split among all three performances, with no single title getting enough ballots for him to be nominated.

*He was knighted in 1974, one year after the Bahamas gained independence from the English. Because he was a US citizen it was decided that he would receive an honorary knighthood (Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire) instead of a substantive one, meaning he couldn’t go the by the title “Sir” that UK citizens who are knighted can.

*He wrote 3 autobiographies and 1 novel in his lifetime. His autobiographical books are This Life (1980), The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000), and Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter (2008). His novel is called Montaro Caine, and was released in May 2013.

*In later life he stepped off the sound stage and onto the diplomatic scene when he became a Bahamian ambassador to Japan, a position he held from 1997 until 2007.