10. SIDNEY POITIER (1927 - )
Poitier's breakthrough as the first African-American actor fully recognized as a leading man and star secured him a permanent place in the cultural history of the movies, but his status as a major actor and one of the great talents of his day may have eroded a little. In part this is because a lot of the movies he starred in were high-minded tosh that have dated very badly, not least because of the perceived need to present Poitier's characters as being superhuman and even morally superior to whites, the thinking being that a black man wouldn't be worth building a movie around if he were merely human. But just as Jackie Robinson had to play baseball extraordinarily well to earn his place on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was Poitier's enormous talent that made most of his movies watchable at all. Even in something like To Sir, With Love, his powerful presence and banked fires seems informed by the mixture of intelligence and anger that made him stand out as the student worth saving in the juvenile-delinquency melodrama The Blackboard Jungle. It would be nice to report that, as the sixties gave way to the seventies and opportunities began to open up for black artists, Poitier was able to drop the black messiah act and take more challenging, morally complicated parts, but instead, he seemed to accept the idea that "Sidney Poitier" was a fixed concept that had no place in the era of Super Fly and Shaft. (In one of his 1971 movies, Brother John, his mistreated black Southerner character turned out to really be Jesus.) Poitier withdrew from the center of the film world, concentrating on directing and appearing in light comedies, aimed at the underserved African-American family audience, in which he played tightass straight man to such co-stars as Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby. Them after a long layoff, he turned up acting again in such movies as Shoot to Kill, Little Nikita, and Sneakers. He didn't look as if he'd aged much and he could still command the screen, but the new scripts sucked about as much as the old ones had. He appears to have been effectively retired for the last decade or so.
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