IT WAS the slap heard around the world. The moment occurs during 1967 drama In The Heat Of The Night, when Sidney Poitier’s Black policeman, who is investigating a murder in the Deep South, is struck by a racist white suspect, a plantation owner — in a flash, he hits back. The scene became a clarion call for the American civil-rights movement, and it resounded beyond the US too: Nelson Mandela would later relate how he was inspired by seeing it while imprisoned. On set, director Norman Jewison fretted about it, but Poitier reassured him, saying: “Don’t worry, the scene will work, and it will be powerful.” As Jewison tells Empire now, “He was not only a friend, but one of the most intelligent actors I have had the privilege of working with.”
Poitier, the Oscar-winning star, filmmaker and activist who passed away in January aged 94, forged a path for others from the start. In 1951 film Cry, The Beloved Country, virtually his first film, he played a reverend in a story addressing social structures that would later give rise to apartheid in South Africa. In 1964, he became the first Black man to win Best Actor at the Academy Awards for his role as an itinerant worker in Lilies Of The Field. In 1972 he made and starred in his politically trenchant directorial debut, Western Buck And The Preacher.