Best Actor (Scenes from the Improbable Life and Career of Sidney Poitier)

The irresistible story of Hollywood’s first Black movie star, whose beauty, charisma, and drive swept him from his family’s Bahamian tomato farm to the silver screen, where he shouldered the responsibility of representing Black Americans in a rapidly changing nation

When Sidney Poitier died in 2022 at nearly ninety-five years old, tributes flooded the internet from fans whose lives he’d touched. Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey thanked him for opening the door to all the Black artists who followed him; ordinary moviegoers thanked him for modeling Black excellence or for demonstrating through his grace and humanity the error of their racial prejudice. The first Black matinee idol and later the first Black commercially successful director, Poitier integrated American cinema—and with it helped transform the country. But in the late 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement gave way to Black Power, the dignity, integrity, and kindness on-screen and off that won him the admiration of millions also earned him the ire of younger Black radicals who considered his saintly and accommodating roles an affront to the cause of Black liberation. Behind that infallible smile and preternatural calm, Poitier often felt trapped. The historical moment in which he made it both created opportunities and constrained him, and he bore the impossible burden of many other people’s dreams.

In Best Actor, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author and professor James Goodman brings us inside the life of Sidney Poitier the man, mining previously untapped sources to tell Poiter’s story in a whole new way. Best Actor follows Poitier from sleeping on the streets of New York City to filming amid the dangers and indignities of apartheid South Africa, from evading loyalty oaths in 1950s Hollywood to being chased by Klansmen in 1960s Mississippi, from a lifelong brotherhood with Harry Belafonte to a tumultuous affair with Diahann Carroll while married to Juanita Hardy, the mother of four of his children. In drawing the arc of a marvelous life and spectacular career, Goodman captures Poitier’s singularity with a scholar’s insight and a lifelong fan’s zeal.

Best Actor is a joyous, stirring, and remarkably relevant celebration of a life and career that reshaped America and the movies it loves.