“I knew for certain that I was meant to be an actor,” Poitier said of the opening night, “when the curtain came down on opening night in New York.”
That sentence is important because it acknowledges something that a tidier version of his story might elide: that even at this point in his career, with a decade of professional work behind him and an Academy Award nomination to his name, the certainty of vocation had not always been available to him. The work was always there. The commitment was always there. The knowledge that this was right, that this was the thing he was made for — that, apparently, took until the curtain fell in March 1959 to arrive with full force.
The play ran on Broadway for 530 performances. Poitier reprised the role in the 1961 film adaptation, and the work on Walter Lee Younger informed everything he brought to the screen in the years between then and the Oscar ceremony.
He had films in this period beyond the Hansberry adaptation. Paris Blues, in 1961, cast him as a jazz musician in Paris alongside Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Diahann Carroll. The film is less remembered than it might have been, but it was another instance of Poitier playing a man of talent and sophistication in a world where his presence was not automatically in question.
And then came the film that would take him to April 13, 1964.
## Lilies of the Field: Homer Smith and the Nuns in the Desert