Sidney Poitier: a natural film star who quietly pioneered a revolution

Poitier, who has died aged 94, came to fame via a trio of movie roles defined by race and racial difference

For postwar America, Sidney Poitier became something like the black Cary Grant: a strikingly handsome and well-spoken Bahamian-American actor. He was a natural film star who projected passion, yet tempered by a kind of refinement and restraint that white moviegoers found very reassuring. Poitier was graceful, manly, self-possessed, with an innate dignity and a tremendous screen presence. He also had a beautiful, melodious voice - the result of his childhood spent in the Bahamas, and then struggling early years in New York, trying to make it as an actor and privately studying the voices of mellifluous white radio announcers. He was a traditional, classical actor in many ways, following in the footsteps of Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, but eminently castable in a new generation of modern roles.

Almost all his famous movie roles are defined by race and racial difference, particularly that extraordinary trio of movies that came out in one year, 1967. In To Sir With Love, he was the visiting black teacher in swinging London who gets through to the kids by challenging them to be adults. In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner he is the black man who wants to marry a young white woman, in an America where this was still illegal in many southern states. (This proposal causes excruciating discomfiture in his fiancee's liberal parents, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.) And in In the Heat of the Night he was the black homicide detective forced to assist a bigoted white cop, played by Rod Steiger.