Sidney Poitier
Rejected at his first audition for being unable to read, he learned from a waiter and won an Oscar
Sidney Poitier was born prematurely in Miami while his parents were there selling tomatoes, and grew up on Cat Island in the Bahamas, in a house without electricity or running water, not seeing a car or a mirror until his family moved to Nassau when he was ten. At sixteen he was sent to relatives in Miami, and soon afterwards travelled alone to New York, where he slept in a bus station toilet and washed dishes.
He answered an advertisement for actors at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem. He read haltingly, in a thick island accent, and the director told him to stop wasting people's time and get a job as a dishwasher. Stung, he bought a radio and spent months imitating the announcers' voices. An elderly Jewish waiter at the restaurant where he worked sat with him each night after closing and taught him to read from the newspaper. He went back to the theatre, offered to work as its janitor in return for lessons, and was accepted.
Film roles followed: Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones, and in 1963 Lilies of the Field, for which he became the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. In 1967 he was the biggest box-office star in America with To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
He later directed films, served as the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan and received an honorary knighthood. He died in 2022, aged 94.