The Start Of His Career

 Sidney Poitier has died at age 94. A perennial Oscar nominee in the 1960s, Poitier became a movie star at a time when Hollywood tended to relegate Black actors to roles as servants, appearing for just a scene or two, often as comic relief. But he was rarely a supporting player, even at the start of his career. He took leads, specializing in a specific type: the educated, well-mannered, middle-class professional who had assimilated into the parts of white society willing to accept him.

Throughout his first two decades in show business, Poitier’s films often promoted powerful messages about the ignorance of bigotry. His charisma and grace made him popular with white and Black audiences alike, and played no small part in easing some of the racial tensions in America — just by giving controversial issues an amiable advocate.

These 11 Poitier movies span the ’50s to the ’90s, when he semiretired. They offer a good overview of not just the scope of his career, but of how the country changed during his 50-plus years in show business.

‘No Way Out’

After a relatively short stint as a New York stage actor, Poitier made an auspicious big-screen debut in 1950 with the writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s unusual hybrid of social drama and film noir. As a doctor struggling against the ingrained racism of his patients — including a career criminal played by Richard Widmark — Poitier allowed audiences to see what even accomplished Black Americans were facing every day, and how that kind of abuse could rattle a person’s psyche.

‘Edge of the City’

In Poitier’s best 1950s film, he plays a longshoreman who becomes fast friends with a co-worker (played by John Cassavetes) who’s secretly AWOL from the military. Though one’s an upstanding citizen and the other’s a deserter, they are treated differently by their cruel boss (Jack Warden), who doesn’t like seeing any of his people getting chummy — especially not when one’s white and one’s Black. Less preachy than many of Poitier’s pictures from this era, “Edge of the City” has a bracing naturalism, born of its roots in the adventurous, progressive New York theater and television scenes.

‘A Raisin in the Sun’

In a sublime bit of cultural kismet, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece arrived when Poitier was the right age to tackle one of theater’s great characters: the pragmatic, prickly Walter Younger. Unlike the softer-edged, friendlier men Poitier had been portraying up to then, Walter doesn’t have much faith in the great dream of integration. He argues with his more idealistic family members about whether they should use a financial windfall to move into a white neighborhood, and his cynicism brings to light arguments that were being had by Black families everywhere in the ’50s and ’60s — except on the big screen.

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‘A Patch of Blue’

Poitier won a best actor Oscar for “Lilies of the Field” (1963), which would become the first of a short string of films (including “To Sir, With Love” from 1967 and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”) in which he played handy, disarming individuals, helping white people improve their attitudes. Most of these movies are more interesting now for how they reveal the subtle racism of well-meaning left-leaning filmmakers, but “A Patch of Blue” is a refreshing exception, and the first movie to watch from this batch. As a kindly soul who helps a poor, abused blind teenager stand up for herself, Poitier is saintly but grounded. And the writer-director Guy Green’s adaptation of an Elizabeth Kata novel is unusually wise about how sometimes class matters as much as race in America.

‘In the Heat of the Night’

In between his social-issue films, Poitier made plenty of genre pictures where race was a key element of the plot (as in the two-fisted 1958 adventure “The Defiant Ones,” and the 1966 western “Duel at Diablo”). The most popular of these is the best picture-winning “In the Heat of the Night,” in which the actor plays a brilliant Philadelphia homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs, who is drafted to help a small-town Mississippi police department crack a difficult case. Refusing to defer to his virulently prejudiced hosts, Tibbs carries himself as a truly free man, in ways that audiences back in 1967 found thrilling. He’d go on to play the character twice more: in “They Call Me Mister Tibbs!” (1970) and “The Organization” (1971).