The women in his adult life are less frequently foregrounded in the public narrative of his career. Juanita Hardy, whom he married in 1950, was his wife through the period of his early film career, including the No Way Out debut and the Defiant Ones nomination. They had four daughters together. The marriage ended in divorce.
Joanna Shimkus, a Canadian actress, became his wife in 1976, after a relationship that had begun several years earlier. They had two daughters together. By the accounts available, their partnership was sustaining and durable in a way that his first marriage had not been — they were together until his death in 2022, nearly fifty years.
These relationships are part of the architecture of his life. They don’t appear prominently in the story of the reading lessons or the Oscar win because they are not the subject of those stories. But they are part of the larger picture of how a person builds a life, and the building is not only professional. The building is also relational, familial, domestic — the ordinary human work of sustaining connection across time.
Poitier wrote to his granddaughter in Life Beyond Measure (2008). The book’s epistolary form — letters to a child about what he had learned — suggests something about how he understood the transmission of values. He had received values from his family on Cat Island. He was trying to transmit values to the generation that followed. The chain of transmission was not broken by the professional ambitions and the Hollywood career and the Oscar. It continued.