Trailblazing actor, director and Hollywood icon Sidney Poitier has written a new memoir, Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter, which, as the title implies is his life story told in letters to his great-granddaughter. His previous memoirs, This Life and The Measure of a Man have been wildly successful (Measure of a Man was an Oprah Book Club selection) and illuminating, letting us know a bit more about this living Hollywood legend and the struggles and obstacles he has faced and emerged triumphant.

In 1967, Sidney Poitier had three box-office smashes: “To Sir, With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night,” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” It was the career apex of a trailblazing actor who had vaulted over Hollywood’s color barrier to become Hollywood’s first black leading man, upturning the stereotypical roles inhabited by Butterfly McQueen, Stepin Fetchit and the like. Poitier gave the movies a bold new image of an African American man who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his white counterparts. That he did this during the turbulent years of the civil rights era made his impact even greater.

Then, suddenly, the love affair was over. In the racial and political fury of the late ‘60, Poitier and the button-down, impossibly noble characters he played became outdated symbols of slow, moderate progress in a country that was in rapid upheaval. He worked decades longer without another major hit, gradually receding into the role of elder statesman — revered by African American actors and filmmakers who passed through doors he opened, but seemingly ignored by just about everyone else.

What will Sidney Poitier’s legacy be to future generations, those born in the Barack Obama era and beyond? It’s an unasked question that resonates through “Life Beyond Measure,” Poitier’s third memoir. Composed as a series of letters to Poitier’s great-granddaughter Ayele, born in 2005 (when Poitier was in his late 70s), the book is equal parts family history, autobiography and ruminations on love, faith, life, death and personal strengths and foibles.

Poitier never lectures or condescends, but “Life Beyond Measure” still has the feel of an old man waxing nostalgic and philosophical to a little girl bouncing on his lap. He revisits oft-told tales from the arc of his life, from his upbringing in a dirt-poor paradise in the Bahamas, to arriving in New York alone at 16 and sleeping in bus-station pay toilets, to the job search that led him to an ad for “actors wanted.” Here, though, the stories are used as object lessons and entrees to broader essays about the world Poitier bequeaths to the little girl. It’s all written in simple, gentle prose that’s restrained even by Poitier’s own standards; not kid stuff exactly, but you won’t find the four-letter words or the simmering anger that fueled Poitier’s two previous books, “This Life” and “The Measure of a Man.”

Source: Breaking barriers

Read an excerpt of Sidney Poitier’s book.

Here’s a look at some of Poitier’s early groundbreaking work….

No Way Out earns its place in the history books thanks to the searing feature film debut of Sidney Poitier, offering a formidable performance as a doctor tending to slum residents whose ethics are put to the test when confronted with blind racism, personified by Richard Widmark as the hateful robber Ray Biddle.

Source: Wikipedia “No Way Out”

Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark in “No Way Out“ (1950)

Here is the trailer for “No Way Out”

Blackboard Jungle is another groundbreaking film, in which Sidney Poitier starred as a teacher in an inner-city school coping with students who exhibited disrupting and sometimes violent behavior.

The film has also been credited with sparking the Rock and Roll revolution by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets’s Rock Around the Clock, initially a B-side, over the film’s opening credits, establishing that song as an instant classic. The music led to a huge teenage audience for the film: their exuberance sometimes overflowed into violence and vandalism at screenings.^[1] In this sense, it has been seen as marking the start of a period of visible teenage rebellion in the late 20th century.

Source: Wikipedia - Blackboard Jungle

Sidney Poitier and Glenn Ford in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955)

Here is a scene from “Blackboard Jungle” - opening day at school

Sidney Poitier won the Oscar for “Lillies of the Field,” the first black ever to win a Best Actor Academy Award.

Sidney Poitier with Lilia Skala in “Lilies of the Field”

Final scene of “Lilies of the Field”

Sidney Poitier’s 1964 Oscar acceptance speech for “Lilies of the Field”

That’s just a small sampling of Sidney Poitier’s impressive, trailblazing early work in Hollywood. In an era in which movies were dominated with images of black stereotypes, Poitier’s dignified leading man roles were remarkable indeed.

Apparently with Barbara Walters there is a statute of limitation on secrecy if it means more book sales. And so it is that former U.S. Senator Edward Brooke’s Wikipedia entry has been edited today to let the reader know of Barbara Walters’ revelation of a previously secret affair in the 1970s.

After three decades of keeping mum, Barbara Walters is disclosing a past affair with married U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, whom she remembers as “exciting” and “brilliant.”

Senator Edward W. Brooke in 1973 - Photo Credit: Jim Cole

Appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” scheduled to air Tuesday, Walters shares details of her relationship with Brooke that lasted several years in the 1970s, according to a transcript of the show provided to The Associated Press.

A moderate Republican from Massachusetts who took office in 1967, Brooke was the first African-American to be popularly elected to the Senate. Both he and Walters knew that public knowledge of their affair could have ruined his career as well as hers, Walters says.

At the time, the twice-divorced Walters was a rising star in TV news and co-host of NBC’s TODAY show, but would soon jump to ABC News, where she has enjoyed unrivaled success. Her affair with Brooke, which never before came to light, had ended before he lost his bid for a third term in 1978.

[…]

Winfrey asks Walters if she was in love.

“I was certainly — I don’t know — I was certainly infatuated.”

“Infatuated.”

“I was certainly involved,” Walters says. “He was exciting. He was brilliant. It was exciting times in Washington.”

Source: Barbara Walters reveals affair with senator

Photo credit: White House
Edward Brooke receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 as President George W. Bush congratulates him

It is a strange and unexpected way for former Senator Edward Brooke to find himself in the limelight again. For those who never never heard of him, he was the first black U.S. Senator, since the Reconstruction Era, serving from 1967-1979. We suspect he prefers to be remembered for that than for this.

More about Barbara Walter’s new memoir, Audition:

Audition: A Memoir

Arthur C. Clark, a towering figure in science fiction and futurism has died at 90.

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide, confirmed the death and said Mr. Clarke had been experiencing breathing problems, The Associated Press reported. He had suffered from post-polio syndrome for the last two decades.

The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.

His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent of war,” giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.

Mr. Clarke’s influence on public attitudes toward space was acknowledged by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, by scientists like the astronomer Carl Sagan and by movie and television producers. Gene Roddenberry credited Mr. Clarke’s writings with giving him courage to pursue his “Star Trek” project in the face of indifference, even ridicule, from television executives.

In his later years, after settling in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Mr. Clarke continued to bask in worldwide acclaim as both a scientific sage and the pre-eminent science fiction writer of the 20th century. In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Mr. Clarke played down his success in foretelling a globe-spanning network of communications satellites. “No one can predict the future,” he always maintained. But as a science fiction writer he couldn’t resist drawing up timelines for what he called “possible futures.” Far from displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of technology — from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that “clean, safe power” from “cold fusion” would be commercially available in the first years of the new millennium.

The New York Times obituary continues.

Wired had this to say.

Arthur C. Clarke, the award-winning sci-fi writer and futurist most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, died Wednesday at his home in Sri Lanka. He was 90.

His writing, both fiction and nonfiction, established Clarke as a visionary. In a paper titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” published in 1945 , Clarke floated the idea of using geosynchronous satellites for communications long before such technology changed our world. As a result, geostationary orbit is now sometimes known as the Clarke orbit.

That’s just one of the many innovative concepts Clark is credited with unleashing. From the electrosecretary transcription machine to the space elevator, Clarke laid out his visionary ideas in more than 100 fiction and nonfiction books.

Despite his track record as a futurist, Clarke remained humble about his work when he was interviewed for a 1993 Q&A with Wired magazine.

“I’ve never predicted the future,” Clarke said. “Or hardly ever. I extrapolate. Look, I’ve written six stories about the end of the Earth; they can’t all be true!”

Clarke picked his book The Songs of Distant Earth as his favorite personal writing, saying, “It’s got everything in it that I ever wanted to say.”

In one of the writer’s last published works, a submission to Wired magazine’s six-word story project in 2006, Clarke bent the rules a bit and refused to trim his 10-word piece (”God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”)

Arthur C. Clarke greets attendees at ISDC 2001.



Arthur C. Clarke 90th birthday reflections, recorded in December 2007.



Stanley Kubrick 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2 m and 01 sec