Tuesday, February 1, 2000

PBS series spotlights actor, director Sidney Poitier

PBS' classy portrait series "American Masters" (7 p.m., Wednesday) celebrates the career of actor Sidney Poitier with a one-hour episode called "One Bright Light," directed and narrated by one of his former co-stars, Lee Grant. They shared screen time in "In the Heat of the Night," which like many of Poitier's films, dealt head-on with the issues of racism and prejudice.
   Poitier says he's encountered racism of varying degrees throughout this 50 years in Hollywood, but has found "there's been a bushel of change."
   "Certainly we're not home yet," the actor told a group of television critics recently. "But yes, we've come this far and we have still a while to go."
   Born in 1927 on tiny Cat Island in the Bahamas, Poitier grew up on a tomato farm in a close family that he credits with instilling in him an unwavering sense of pride.
   "Pride and entitlement. I brought it with me from Cat Island," he said.
   From stage to film
   Leaving the Bahamas at 15, Poitier had his first brush with segregation (and the Klan) in Florida, an experience so frightening he fled to New York. He arrived in Times Square with $3 and spent the summer sleeping on rooftops and working as a dishwasher. An audition notice for the American Negro Theater sparked the idea of becoming an actor. But he was rejected by the company and told by its director to "stop wasting people's time."
   Humiliated, Poitier resolved to educate himself and get rid of his sing-songy Caribbean accent, which he did by imitating American radio announcers.
   A second audition landed him a role in a black version of "Lysistrata." He blew his lines on opening night, but reviews in the New York papers mentioned his electrifying stage presence.
   A film career quickly followed, with starring roles in "No Way Out," "Blackboard Jungle," "Raisin in the Sun," "The Defiant Ones," "To Sir with Love" "A Patch of Blue," "Lilies of the Field" (which won Poitier a Best Actor Oscar) and the groundbreaking "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"
   In the late 1960s, Poitier was the biggest box office star in the world, but he found himself criticized by black activists as being too passive in an era that had seen the assassinations of black leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He retreated to the Bahamas to reassess his life and emerged in the 1970s as one of Hollywood's busiest directors, turning out a series of hit black-oriented comedies including "Uptown Saturday Night," "Buck and the Preacher" and "Stir Crazy."
   Writing and diplomacy
   He didn't act onscreen again until 1988 ("Shoot to Kill") and has acted only sporadically since, most recently in the highly acclaimed CBS TV-movie "The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn."
   Lately his time has been spent writing a second autobiography (his first was a best seller in 1976) and serving as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan.
   The PBS program offers a respectful, almost worshipful look at Poitier, a actor whose sense of dignity and self-awareness is so deep that he still regrets, decades later, playing a villain in "The Long Ships" and what he considered a negative stereotype in the film version of "Porgy & Bess."
   "Those were the exceptions," he said quietly.
   Not surprisingly, the actor whom Poitier says most reminds him of himself these days is Denzel Washington. The "Hurricane" star is included in the interviews about Poitier on "American Masters."
   Poitier isn't actively seeking movie roles anymore but said, "I haven't taken down my shingle yet."
   He's content instead to "deepen the experience of living in the moment," he said. "That sounds a little weird, but it's true. When you get to be as old as I am, you become very possessive of your most important asset, which is your time."
   Tonight on PBS
   A fascinating five-parter called "Secrets of Lost Empires" (7 p.m. tonight) starts out with a look at how medieval armies constructed and used catapults. Two teams of engineers compete to see which one can knock down a stone wall, a feat that's tougher than either team imagines.
   In following episodes, scientists and engineers will tackle the "how did they do that?" mysteries of how those big heads were carved and moved on Easter Island, how the Romans maintained those luxurious public baths, how the ancient Chinese built the "Rainbow Bridge" of interlocking timbers and how the Egyptians built and raised giant obelisks.
  
  
  

 
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