This past weekend we were
hit with the deaths of a trio of celebrities: one a true icon, the other two sitcom stars who defined a moment in time for the generations they represented.
We lost a huge figure in Sidney Poitier, an absolutely across-the-board iconic figure who spanned the generations, but was really a guy who hit the nerve of the Baby Boomers.
This is a person who proved that you can come from nothing and make it in this country and in this world, and that is exactly what Poitier proved, being born in the U.S. but growing up in Barbados, and returning to the states with nothing but a dream.
And the dream was fulfilled even with the most incredible of circumstances before him, going from a dishwasher to perhaps the most important actor working during the late 1950s and through the 1960s.
Whether playing the tough juvenile in “The Blackboard Jungle” or the tough as nails cop in “In the Heat of the Night,” Poitier was a larger-the-life figure both on the screen and off of it, becoming really the first across-the-board black movie star.
He was an everyman in black skin, generally taking roles that were positive ones, roles that demonstrated positiveness, and that were palpable and believable no matter what the viewers’ backgrounds were.
And when he became perhaps the top movie star in the country—the first black actor to win the Academy Award as best actor--he worked just as hard behind the scenes to ensure that he was heard, and heard for the betterment of all people.
Baby Boomers of every ilk attached themselves to him, and he became our favorite movie star, because he not only represented his own people, but he represented all of us, questioning the powers that be and going against the then-current grain when necessary.
Whether playing Virgil Tibbs or the “sir” in “To Sir With Love,” Poitier gave performances that were mesmerizing, and when he wiped convention off the floor, he had such intensity that you could see it in his eyes, which would nearly fly out of his head with purpose.
During 1967 alone, he made three classic films, films that have spanned the generations, films that one can watch today and see the master at his craft: “In the Heat of the Night,” “To Sir With Love,” and “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner,” three movies that you could put up with any trio of films by any star in any generation and rank them with the best.
I read one obituary of his that stated that his films, although beloved by the public, were thought of as nothing more than “pap” to suck in white audiences to the messages that these movies generated.
If these films were indeed “pap,” then they were the most powerful “pap” movies ever made, and this “pap” defined the Baby Boomers and what we saw on screen.
I have one kind of funny anecdote about Poitier, not directly about the actor but about one of his movies and two dopey kids’ reactions to one of them.
When I was growing up in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, it was almost a given that when any movie starring Poitier would come out, all of us kids would see it at the local movie house, the Rochdale Village Movie Theater.
Well, in 1970, when I was 12 going on 13, my friend Brian and I—me a white kid, he a black kid—went to see a double feature at the local movie theater, “That Man From Rio” and “They Call Me Mr. Tibbs,” the latter of which saw Poitier return to the screen as Virgil Tibbs.
Anyway, that movie opens up with a scene—which is often excised from the film when it is shown today, but is actually pivotal to the entire premise of the movie—where a woman is shown topless and ends up being murdered.
You don’t see much, but you see enough to tantalize two dopey pre-teens just discovering their sexuality, meaning myself and my friend.
Couple that with a few scenes in the other film that fed into all of that—one of which a female character is forced to show her "worthiness' by stripping down to a metallic bra that left little to the imagination—and we actually stayed for three showings of each movie, just to see those scenes!
Yes, the wonders of growing up, and we can thank Poitier for some of that … and that doesn’t minimize his real impact on our lives as an actor and activist, but I will bet that if I ever was fortunate to have met up with him and told him that story, he would have given out one of his big laughs and shook his head in amazement that I would even bring this up to him!
We lost a huge figure in Sidney Poitier, an absolutely across-the-board iconic figure who spanned the generations, but was really a guy who hit the nerve of the Baby Boomers.
This is a person who proved that you can come from nothing and make it in this country and in this world, and that is exactly what Poitier proved, being born in the U.S. but growing up in Barbados, and returning to the states with nothing but a dream.
And the dream was fulfilled even with the most incredible of circumstances before him, going from a dishwasher to perhaps the most important actor working during the late 1950s and through the 1960s.
Whether playing the tough juvenile in “The Blackboard Jungle” or the tough as nails cop in “In the Heat of the Night,” Poitier was a larger-the-life figure both on the screen and off of it, becoming really the first across-the-board black movie star.
He was an everyman in black skin, generally taking roles that were positive ones, roles that demonstrated positiveness, and that were palpable and believable no matter what the viewers’ backgrounds were.
And when he became perhaps the top movie star in the country—the first black actor to win the Academy Award as best actor--he worked just as hard behind the scenes to ensure that he was heard, and heard for the betterment of all people.
Baby Boomers of every ilk attached themselves to him, and he became our favorite movie star, because he not only represented his own people, but he represented all of us, questioning the powers that be and going against the then-current grain when necessary.
Whether playing Virgil Tibbs or the “sir” in “To Sir With Love,” Poitier gave performances that were mesmerizing, and when he wiped convention off the floor, he had such intensity that you could see it in his eyes, which would nearly fly out of his head with purpose.
During 1967 alone, he made three classic films, films that have spanned the generations, films that one can watch today and see the master at his craft: “In the Heat of the Night,” “To Sir With Love,” and “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner,” three movies that you could put up with any trio of films by any star in any generation and rank them with the best.
I read one obituary of his that stated that his films, although beloved by the public, were thought of as nothing more than “pap” to suck in white audiences to the messages that these movies generated.
If these films were indeed “pap,” then they were the most powerful “pap” movies ever made, and this “pap” defined the Baby Boomers and what we saw on screen.
I have one kind of funny anecdote about Poitier, not directly about the actor but about one of his movies and two dopey kids’ reactions to one of them.
When I was growing up in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, it was almost a given that when any movie starring Poitier would come out, all of us kids would see it at the local movie house, the Rochdale Village Movie Theater.
Well, in 1970, when I was 12 going on 13, my friend Brian and I—me a white kid, he a black kid—went to see a double feature at the local movie theater, “That Man From Rio” and “They Call Me Mr. Tibbs,” the latter of which saw Poitier return to the screen as Virgil Tibbs.
Anyway, that movie opens up with a scene—which is often excised from the film when it is shown today, but is actually pivotal to the entire premise of the movie—where a woman is shown topless and ends up being murdered.
You don’t see much, but you see enough to tantalize two dopey pre-teens just discovering their sexuality, meaning myself and my friend.
Couple that with a few scenes in the other film that fed into all of that—one of which a female character is forced to show her "worthiness' by stripping down to a metallic bra that left little to the imagination—and we actually stayed for three showings of each movie, just to see those scenes!
Yes, the wonders of growing up, and we can thank Poitier for some of that … and that doesn’t minimize his real impact on our lives as an actor and activist, but I will bet that if I ever was fortunate to have met up with him and told him that story, he would have given out one of his big laughs and shook his head in amazement that I would even bring this up to him!
(At least I hope that would have happened if I ever got the chance to meet him and tell him this "coming of age" story.)
Poitier was most probably the favorite actor of the Baby Boomers, and he will absolutely and definitely be missed.
He passed away at age 94, and no cause of death has yet been given.
And then we have two lesser actors who also passed away this weekend, but two actors who certainly had great impacts on the viewing public when they were at the peak of their popularity.
Poitier was most probably the favorite actor of the Baby Boomers, and he will absolutely and definitely be missed.
He passed away at age 94, and no cause of death has yet been given.
And then we have two lesser actors who also passed away this weekend, but two actors who certainly had great impacts on the viewing public when they were at the peak of their popularity.
Dwayne Hickman was an icon to the early Baby Boomers, those who were born in the early 1950s, when he starred in the completely off-beat sitcom “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.”
This was probably the first sitcom whose teen characters were not All-American types--no Wally Cleavers here--but a bit off center, and the show typified the “everyman” during the years leading up to the JFK era and early on in Camelot.
Hickman as Dobie Gillis rarely got the girl, or at least the girl he wanted to get, and Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver … well, he existed in a world which was pretty much of his own creation as he played his bongos to his own beat.
As probably the first TV sitcom to feature teenagers as its primary characters, the show was also the jumping off point for the “perfect” teens, Warren Beatty and Tuesday Weld, but Hickman and Denver were the true stars of this very creative, offbeat show.
Hickman died of complications from Parkinson’s Disease at age 87.
And then we heard about the unfortunate passing of Bob Saget, who was the perfect dad of his generation during the run of “Full House,” a show that became something of a cultural phenomenon in the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, followed by a recent reboot that lasted four more years.
My wife and I found out about his passing-while watching the long-running “America’s Favorite Home Videos,” a show that he was the original host of when it debuted more than 30 years ago.
In something I had never seen before, ABC broke into the show during the last three minutes of its run on Sunday evening to announce that Saget had died at age 65, apparently of natural causes, just after performing his standup routine in Orlando, Florida.
It was as if ABC wanted to get the “Breaking News” item in before the show ended, and did so in this kind of eerie way.
R.I.P. to Poitier, Hickman and Saget.
They all enriched our lives, and each left us a long legacy of performances that defined them for our generation and those generations that follow us.
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