Sidney Poitier

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1927 age 0

   Born

2. 1955 age 28

   CreditBlackboard Jungle

3. 1957 age 30

   CreditBand of Angels

4. 1958 age 31

   CreditThe Defiant Ones

5. 1959 age 32

   CreditPorgy and Bess

6. 1963 age 36

   CreditLilies of the Field

7. 1964 age 37

   CreditThe Long Ships

8. 1965 age 38

   CreditA Patch of Blue

   CreditThe Greatest Story Ever Told

9. 1967 age 40

   CreditGuess Who's Coming to Dinner

   CreditIn the Heat of the Night

   CreditTo Sir, with Love

10. 1980 age 53

    CreditStir Crazydirector

11. 1988 age 61

    CreditShoot to Kill

12. 1992 age 65

    CreditSneakers

13. 1997 age 70

    CreditThe Jackal

14. 2016 age 89

    CreditI Am Not Your Negro

15. 2022 age 94

    Died

• WSWilliam Schallert2 titles
• JGJerry Goldsmith2 titles
• TCTony Curtis2 titles
• CHCharlton Heston2 titles
• RSRod Steiger2 titles
• CAClaude Akins2 titles
• SKStanley Kramer2 titles
• BRBeah Richards2 titles
• TSTimothy Scott2 titles
• SWShelley Winters2 titles

• Partner

  • DCDiahann Carroll

• Children

  • SPSydney Tamiia Poitier

Nothing recorded for: Spouse, Parents, Siblings, Influenced by, Studied under, Taught.

• 
  Photo:Unknown photographerPublic domain

• The older we get the less afraid we are.

  Sidney Poitier, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.

  Sidney Poitier, CC BY-SA 4.0

• If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things—you feel that after death, you will be no more.

  Sidney Poitier, CC BY-SA 4.0

• When you’re addressing power, don’t expect it to crumble willingly. If you’re going to say, "Hey now, look you guys, please look at what you did and look at yourselves and punish yourselves and at least try to square this thing, right?"— well, you’ll make slower progress at that than you would expect. I mean, even the most modest expectations are going to be unfulfilled. <br /> Think about it. Today there are still people all over the world who maintain that the Holocaust didn’t happen. There are people in the United States — people among that power echelon we speak of — who maintain that all slaves were happy. There are those power symbols that always say, "Well, it was for the good of the states. It was for the cohesion of the political process." There are myriad justifications for denial. <br /> There are also people who say, "Hey, after thirty years of affirmative action, they’ve got it made. Black people — it’s their own fault if they can’t make it today." <br /> Yeah, well, of co

  Sidney Poitier, CC BY-SA 4.0

• A lot of black leaders, along with a lot of sympathetic white people, would say it’s too early in this country for forgiveness. We haven’t dealt with accountability yet, admission of guilt yet. And we certainly don’t have equality yet. But among the things that we must try to get done is the nurturing of a civilized, fair, principled, humane society. Now, if a part of that nurturing — part of the movement toward it, some of the efforts spent in that direction — would bring us to a new understanding, a new acceptance, even some forgiveness, what then? And not just forgiveness from the people who’ve been wronged. Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.

  Sidney Poitier, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Compassion for other human beings has to extend to the society that’s been grinding the powerless under its heel. The more civilized the society becomes, the more humane it becomes; the more it can see its own humanity, the more it sees the ways in which its humanity has been behaving inhumanly. This injustice of the world inspires a rage so intense that to express it fully would require homicidal action; it’s self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage. Simply put, I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.

  Sidney Poitier, CC BY-SA 4.0