Sidney Poitier: To Sir, With Love

I met Sidney Poitier for the first time in the summer of 1994. He was starring in the television film, Children of the Dust. I played a supporting role in that project, a character who just happened to be married to Sidney’s co-star, Farrah Fawcett.

As some say, there are times when acting beats working for a living.

In company like that, filming in the foothills of Alberta and staying at one of the best hotels in Canada, Calgary’s Palliser, it could only have gotten better if I’d been on my honeymoon.

In spite of the fact that I had the extreme pleasure of having a bedroom scene with Farrah Fawcett as my wife in the film, Ms. Fawcett’s character in Children of the Dust, though a bit “round the bend” … like some North American, pioneer Ophelia … had the profoundly healthy instinct of falling in love with Sidney Poitier.

Who could blame anybody for falling in love with Sidney Poitier?!

At that time in my life, however, I was not in love but seriously in trouble with a lot of things, mainly New York City itself … and I was seriously considering my eventual move to Canada.

I had already left the television series, Law and Order, largely because of my high profile battle with the Attorney General of the very Progressive Clinton Administration, Janet Reno. That row over Constitutionality was beyond politically incorrect and had become very common knowledge in Manhattan.

As the late sports writer, Dick Schaap asked of me, “Is there anyone in Manhattan that you haven’t offended?”

They hadn’t thought of a Glenn Beck Award in those days, so I had no refuge to possibly look forward to.

Mr. Beck’s present boss, Roger Ailes, flew to the rescue for a vaguely memorable moment with talk television, but by then Janet Reno and a family history of alcoholism had driven me into every bar from New York to Halifax.

President Clinton’s popularity ratings , however, were holding fairly strong, despite Janet Reno’s unconscionable attack upon the Koresh Compound, leaving 80 men, women and children dead.

The reasons for my departure from Law and Order seemed to have been Sidney’s main interest during our conversations on set. He was fascinated with the decision and didn’t so much argue with me about it, but ask very insightful and revealing questions, rather like he did in what is now my favorite Poitier performance, that of Mark Thackray in To Sir With Love.

“To Sir, With Love”

Early the next year, after Sidney and his family had moved to New York, he chose me to hand him his Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Board of Review.

Well, by then I had become persona non grata to the elite of Manhattan; and for Sidney to pick me that year as a presenter was a bold decision. His imprimatur was so important that even Stanley Crouch of the Far, Far Left Village Voice asked to have a copy of my words honoring Sidney and later even shared a burger and a beer with me.

Beginning my tribute was the very honest opinion about how drab and homely I felt standing or sitting next to Sidney Poitier.

I said something like, “Only Cary Grant could stand the challenge!”

Actually, after further thought, a cross between Cary Grant and Ronald Coleman might begin to do justice to Sidney Poitier’s handsomeness and his extraordinarily precise yet gentle eloquence.

However, after even further thought … and a recent, second viewing of To Sir, With Love … I doubt if most of 20th Century British Royalty could hold a candle to Sidney Poitier’s nobility.

“And nobility,” as the greatest English-speaking director of the theater, Sir Tyrone Guthrie once said, “is the rarest thing to find in an actor.”

Jose Ferrer had it. As Cyrano de Bergerac and Toulouse Lautrec, Ferrer bristled with the very obsession with detail that, I must say, is the mark of genius in any man.

However, if you couple that genius with the almost spiritual stillness of Sidney Poitier, a quiet which not only holds this audience of one in thrall but keeps the street-prowling thugs of Poitier’s supporting cast oozing with growing fear and awe … well, that’s not just acting at its best, it’s manhood at its highest level.

“In the Heat of the Night”

My own brief tribute to him at that award ceremony concentrated on one line-reading.

“They call me Mister Tibbs!”

The sounds of that line hissed at Rod Steiger like the warnings of a boa constrictor or python!

Rerun Ferrer’s Cyrano and you’ll hear a bravura display of such brilliance.

Poitier’s Mark Thackray, however, stuns us with his stillness, out of which he could move in any direction, at any time and with any speed required.

Dr. Guthrie, as we at the Guthrie theater admiringly called him, spoke of the most exciting moment in theater: “It’s not what does happen, but what might happen!”

Out of Poitier’s stillness, anything might happen.

Only Marlon Brando on screen and Laurence Olivier on stage had such potential danger to the extent that Poitier’s performances contain it.

In a long master shot within To Sir, With Love, Poitier’s character approaches a particularly dangerous thug in the room and does so … very slowly … while harnessing a bottomless supply of potential rage and violence that one is glad the door opens to interrupt the potential massacre.

That was in a long shot! Poitier, like Olivier, could hurl his persona up into the balcony of the Brooks Atkinson Theater!!

Either in my award speech or at a later date I said this about Sidney Poitier:

“You see a face that you’ve grown up with and admired, someone who was an icon of America, a symbol of strength and persistence and grace. And then you find out that in the everyday, workaday world of doing movies, he is everything he symbolizes on screen.”

Now, after seeing To Sir, With Love again, I kick myself for not urging Sidney to do a Ronald Reagan …

“Run for the Presidency, Sidney!”

It’s too late now. He’d be running for a political party I stopped supporting just before I met him.

Our “Sir” of To Sir, With Love, Sidney Poitier, is at the very top of American Royalty.

Its epitome actually!

Thank God his mother accidentally gave birth to him … indisputably … in the United States.

If she hadn’t, we might have been deprived of his unsurpassable nobility on screen and hours of instruction on how American Royalty should behave.