Poitier would be able to channel his strong sense of identity outside of race into many of his most memorable performances, such as his Oscar-nominated role in 1958’s The Defiant Ones, in which he and Tony Curtis play escaped prisoners chained to each other, forced to set aside their differences to survive.
Although born in Miami, Florida, on February 20, 1927, Sidney Poitier was raised in the Bahamas and it was not until he returned to his birthplace as a teenager when he discovered the limitations forced upon people of color in the United States.
In a conversation with Oprah Winfrey, the icon credited his overcoming of “racial dogma” to his lack of awareness of, nor even belief in, those limitations, as his parents had raised him to understand his own human rights and to be “someone.”