For posterity again. Sidney Poitier spent his childhood in the Bahamas born to a farming couple. He moved to Florida and then to New York, and started his career acting in Broadway. Known for the intensity of his character portrayal and intwgrity towards acting and living, he went on to receive numerous awards for his acting, including Oscars, and was given the Oscar lifetime achievement award in 2002.

An excerpt from his autobiography, 'The Measure of a Man':

Those of us fortunate enough to be in the movie business and to have our faces spread across the screen for many years become slightly iconographic figures, mythic figures, whether we want to be or not. Those who are given the designation "stars" cease to be simply actors and become a part of the collective unconscious, part of the dream fabric of the clutre. It's a tremendous responsibility, and one that members of my profession take on with highly varying degrees of success.

There's a mystery to the relationship between life and an individual human personality, and I think the camera sees that mystery. The individual human personality has, bound up inside itself, a connection to all the wonders of the universe. When an artist is genuinely at work in his craft, he's more fully calling on those connections to be universal.

What does the camera capture when it looks at me? I'll leave that for others to assess. But staring back at that lens from within myself, I feel that so much of what I've otherwise kept hidden is captured and filtered. What emerges on the screen reminds people of something in themselves, because I'm so many different things. I'm a network of primal feelngs, instinctive emotions that have been wrestled with so long they're automatic. The things I don't like about myself, the things I do like about myself, the things I'm not but I'd like to be, the things I am but don't want others to know about - these are all percolating inside. All these contradictory aspects are the basic me. Courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, fear and joy, love and hate - that's what makes up the actor so that's available to the camera.

The lens sees what it sees; it's entirely neutral in its gaze. It's not looking for my best or my worst, and there's no guarantee that it will capture something truly representative. It can't mirror the self completely, but I do know that it can tell when I'm thinking, and I know that it can tell when there's something I'm trying to hide.

When I play anger in a scene, it's different from when I experience anger in life. Anger in life is so genuine that it's instantaneous. It may be triggered explosively; it may be triggered at a low level and, depending on what follows, then escalate or subside. That's life. If someone slaps my kid and I see it, then I'm ready to take that person apart. Correct? Okay, now the actor who doesn't have a child but must play such a reaction in a film, where does he go for examples of the feeling? Where does he go for as close as he can get to the stuff of that emotion, and how does he access it so instantaneously that it's as if, in fact, it were real life?

He goes to his sense memory. He goes deep inside himself into a place where all his individual sense memories are stored, and that place connects him with the universe. That connection gives him access to more than just the memory of what anger is like and what unfairness is or other kinds of impositions or slights or offenses that would trigger anger are like. There's a network of intutions and instincts. I mean, the raw instincts - a genuine network of connections of those forces, energies, and awareness that drive humanity. The entire result of the actor's life experiences to that point have been collected in that sense memory, and every one of them is registered there, many of them that wouldn't have ordinarily be available to the conscious mind. But in acting, a creative moment requires that the actor enter there. And the camera sees that contact with the sense memory. So what it picks up is something that's almost indescribable. Some people call it 'presence', while others say the camera 'likes' the actor. Whatever label we apply, the camera sees something; it just simply sees it.

On a mundane level, you might say that a particular actor has an expressive face. Even when there are no lines being said, you know something's going on in that mind, in that soul. He's just standing there looking off into space, but there's something going on that seems real and alive and genuine.

That's because he's entering that creative place. Or maybe not so much entering it as being receptive to it. It could be said that this place, unto itself, gives off a sense of its own existence, and it comes through, maybe even unknown to the personality itself. Because a mind is operating. Because a heart is beating in that chest.

...


During the filming of 'In the Heat of the Night', Rod Steiger's work was a constant reminder of how lucky I was that I had found my way to two of the greatest teachers of any era, Paul Mann and Lloyd Richards...(Rod) Steiger was a product of the Actors Studio, and his approach to his work fascinated me. His preparation period for a scene was astonishing in its depth. First he explored everything objectively. The he made subjective everything that he'd found in his objective exploration. In this final process, he would zero in on his character so completely that for the entire period of making his picture he would speak in the same cadence. Even sitting down to dinner in the evenings. EVen on weekends, when we ventured out to a movie or dinner or when we sat around the motel just running out mouths about various things. Working or not, he would remain completely immersed in the character of the southern sheriff. He spoke with the same accent, and walked with the same gait, on and off camera. I was astonished at his intensity of involvement with the character...

...I always knew that first-rate actors had exceptional gifts, but I also knew that an exceptional gift, in and of itself, didn't necessarily a first-rate actor make. It was essential that the actor's gift be subject to a technique, a learned procedure, a discipline, in order for him to constantly function at close to his best. I had fumbled about for years trying to find that 'learned procedure', that 'discipline'. I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to put together all the pieces of an effective technique.

There are things that we don't accept in theatre - won't accept, shouldn't accept in theatre - that we have to accept in life. Those are what we call accidents. Some theatrical accidents happen because actors fail to look at causality. Maybe we should all be questioning cause all the time to see if what it appears to be is what in fact it is. Be aware that even if B appears to follow A all the time, proximity doesn't guarantee causality. But no matter whether we misplace, misread, or misidentify it, there is always a cause.

Discovering cause and effect, learning to follow it like a beacon, was a turning point for me. That's when my internal measure as an artist kicked in. Thanks to fine actors like Steiger, Grant, Ruby Dee, Marlon Brando, Alice Childress, Frank Silvera, Spencer Tracy, Canada Lee, and the many others whose examples over the years slowly led me to the light, I was closer than ever to not only being able to recognize the fine line that separates high-quality 'indicating' from first-rate organic acting, but also closer myself to successful permormances on that side of the line where the real pros worked.

While I wasn't home yet in the truly professional sense, I was a long way from those early times back in the theatrical woods when I was told by fellow inexperienced actors and by some not very good drama teachers, "You have to take diaphragm lessons. You have to be able to speak from your diaphragm so that you can be heard up in the last row of the theatre. You must learn to bring your voice from the diaphragm, push it up, squeeze it out so that it will resound into the audience."

Well, I almost squeezed myself to death trying to be heard in the balcony. I'm serious. I was constipated during half my early performances. My stomach was always in one of those Canadian isometric exercises. I mean it was like a knot, I developed such muscles around my diaphragm from squeezing everything out of me all the time.

...But in the beginning there was no one to tell us that acting at its best was a complex, yet simplified, way of reacting to life's circumstances, and that human beings off the stage spend a large part of their lives doing just that: reacting...

...In the absence of a guiding light in my early acting, I moved blindly, with misconceptions pointing the way, and as a result I was too many years in coming to understand my craft. But I finally discovered that there's no difference between actor and audience; neither is a stranger to the experiences of life. I'm broadened as an actor the moment I realise that when people sit in a theatre and watch me expressing feelings similar to their own, they can tell if I'm really experiencing those emotions or if I'm faking them. Deep down inside, where they've had these same experiences and same responses, they know whether I'm interpreting them in a genuine way or just play-acting. Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment. This is all equally true of effective acting. Acting isn't a game of 'pretend'. It's an exercise in being real.

At the point where life and art intersect, John Cassavetes once gave me some advice that has proved invaluable. This was some years ago, when he wanted me to play a particular role. I don't know how, but he senesed reluctance on my part, even though I had said nothing except, "Yes, that would be great. Let's talk about it."

He said, "Let me tell you something." He said, "We're good friends, but never, ever do an artistic favour for a friend. Loan friends money, be there for them in every other way, but don't do them any artistic favours, because you've got to have one area of your life where there's no room for compromise."