The Oscar Night That Opened Hollywood's Door

The envelope was opened in Santa Monica, and history slipped quietly into the room.

It was April 13, 1964, inside the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and the 36th Academy Awards were winding down. When the presenter announced the winner for Best Actor, the name read out belonged to a 37-year-old Bahamian-American actor who had once been told his island accent made him unemployable. Sidney Poitier had just become the first Black man in history to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.

He won for Lilies of the Field (1963), in which he played Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who agrees to build a chapel for a community of nuns. It was a small, warm film — and a performance of such quiet dignity that it carried him past the Academy's longtime color line. At the time, the United States was still legally segregated in much of the country; the Civil Rights Act would not be signed for another three months.

Nothing about Poitier's beginnings suggested this night. He was born on February 20, 1927, in Miami, Florida, while his parents were visiting from the Bahamas, where his father was a tomato farmer, and he grew up on Cat Island. He had, by his own account, "a year and a half" of formal schooling — "still I knew that I was someone," as he later put it. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, then drifted to New York, where he worked as a dishwasher and janitor while chasing acting work.

The American Negro Theatre in Harlem rejected him at first — his Caribbean accent was too thick. So he trained himself to speak like the newscasters he heard on the radio, reapplied, and got in. He debuted on Broadway in 1946 in an all-Black production of Lysistrata and made his film debut in 1950's No Way Out. He refused the stereotypical roles Hollywood offered Black actors, which cost him work and won him something bigger: credibility.

He had already made history once, as the first Black actor nominated for Best Actor, for 1958's The Defiant Ones opposite Tony Curtis. And he was only the second African American to win any Oscar — the first had been Hattie McDaniel, whose Best Supporting Actress win for Gone with the Wind came in 1939, a generation earlier.

What followed the 1964 win sealed his place. In 1967 he starred in three landmark films — In the Heat of the Night, To Sir, With Love, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — and the trade papers named him the biggest film actor of the year, earning a reported $750,000 per picture. He had become, in a segregated industry, its most bankable leading man.

The door he opened stayed open. Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, and Will Smith would all follow him to the Best Actor Oscar; Halle Berry became the first Black woman to win Best Actress in 2001, the same night Poitier received an Honorary Oscar for his lifetime of work. He died in January 2022 at 94, in the Bahamas where he had grown up.

On a spring night in Santa Monica, one man walked to a podium and carried a whole future with him. Hollywood's most exclusive door had never opened for a Black leading man before — and it has never fully closed since.

Photo: Cbl62, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons). The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which hosted the 36th Academy Awards — shown as an illustration, not an image of the 1964 ceremony itself.