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46 free Sidney Poitier trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sidney Poitier trivia covers a life that reads like a screenplay: a premature baby born in Miami to Bahamian tomato farmers, a teenage dishwasher in New York taught to read by a waiter, a fake psychiatric discharge from the Army, a failed first audition, and then a career that broke nearly every colour barrier in Hollywood, culminating in the first Best Actor Oscar for a Black performer in 1964. This quiz follows him from the American Negro Theatre through No Way Out, Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones, the Broadway premiere of A Raisin in the Sun, the Oscar for Lilies of the Field, the extraordinary 1967 of To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and on to his second career directing comedies like Uptown Saturday Night and Stir Crazy. It also covers the honours: knighthood, Kennedy Center Honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a decade as the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan. Easy questions suit anyone who knows 'They call me Mister Tibbs!'; the expert tier is for classic-film devotees. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Poitier and his films, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
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Q 01In which US city was Sidney Poitier born in 1927?
Miami
Poitier was born in Miami on 20 February 1927, arriving two months premature while his Bahamian parents were in Florida to sell tomatoes; the accident of birthplace gave him United States citizenship.
Q 02Where in the Bahamas did Poitier grow up until the age of ten?
Cat Island
Cat Island, where his family farmed tomatoes, was home until he was about ten; he saw his first car, electric light and film only after the family moved to Nassau.
Q 03For which 1963 film did Poitier become the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor?
Lilies of the Field
Lilies of the Field, shot in Arizona in under two weeks on a tiny budget, brought Poitier the Best Actor Oscar at the April 1964 ceremony, presented to him by Anne Bancroft.
Q 04What is the name of Poitier's Oscar-winning character, a handyman who builds a chapel for nuns?
Homer Smith
Homer Smith is an itinerant handyman who stops for water at a farm run by East German nuns; their Mother Superior decides God sent him, and he builds their chapel largely alone.
Q 05Which hymn do the nuns learn from Poitier's handyman in his Oscar-winning film?
'Amen'
'Amen', written for the film by composer Jester Hairston, is taught to the nuns by the handyman and echoes over the closing scene as he drives off into the night.
Q 06Poitier's breakthrough film role was as a high-school student in which 1955 film?
Blackboard Jungle
Blackboard Jungle cast the 28-year-old Poitier as Gregory Miller, a gifted but rebellious student in a tough New York vocational school, opposite Glenn Ford as the new teacher Richard Dadier.
Q 07Poitier's 1955 breakthrough film is remembered as the first major Hollywood film to feature what?
Rock and roll music
Rock and roll music entered mainstream cinema with its opening credits, which run over Bill Haley and His Comets' 'Rock Around the Clock'; the song then topped the US charts and teenage audiences rioted at some screenings.
Q 08What was Poitier's film debut, a 1950 noir in which he played a doctor treating a racist criminal?
No Way Out
No Way Out cast Poitier as Dr. Luther Brooks, a young hospital doctor treating the wounded bigot Ray Biddle, played by Richard Widmark; Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed, and Widmark became a lifelong friend.
Q 09In The Defiant Ones (1958), Poitier and Tony Curtis play escaped convicts who are what?
Chained together
Chained together at the wrist, Poitier's Noah Cullen and Tony Curtis's John Jackson must cooperate to flee a Southern chain gang; the film brought Poitier the first Best Actor Oscar nomination for a Black performer.
Q 10Who directed The Defiant Ones and, nine years later, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Stanley Kramer
Stanley Kramer, known for socially conscious 'message pictures' such as Judgment at Nuremberg and Inherit the Wind, directed both films and also produced them through his own company.
Q 11What award did Poitier win at the 1958 Berlin Film Festival for The Defiant Ones?
The Silver Bear for Best Actor
The Silver Bear for Best Actor went to Poitier at the 1958 Berlin festival for The Defiant Ones; he also won the BAFTA for Best Foreign Actor for the same performance, while the Golden Bear went to Wild Strawberries.
Q 12Poitier starred in the 1959 Broadway premiere of which Lorraine Hansberry play?
A Raisin in the Sun
A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in March 1959 with Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, earning him a Tony nomination; he repeated the role in the 1961 film with most of the original cast.
Q 13Who supplied Poitier's singing voice as Porgy in the 1959 film of Porgy and Bess?
Q 21Which singer debuted in To Sir, with Love and sang its title song, a five-week US number one?
Lulu
Lulu, then a teenager, made her film debut as pupil Barbara Pegg and sang 'To Sir with Love', which spent five weeks at number one and was Billboard's top single of 1967 in America.
Q 22How was Poitier paid for To Sir, with Love, in one of the shrewdest deals in film history?
A percentage of the gross box office
A percentage of the gross box office was his price: Poitier took a modest fee plus 10 percent of the gross, and the film's runaway success forced Columbia to renegotiate the schedule of his payments.
Q 23In A Patch of Blue (1965), Poitier befriends a white teenager who is what?
Robert McFerrin
Robert McFerrin, the first Black man to sing at the Metropolitan Opera and father of Bobby McFerrin, dubbed Porgy's songs uncredited; Adele Addison likewise sang for Dorothy Dandridge's Bess.
Q 14What is the name of Poitier's Philadelphia detective in In the Heat of the Night?
Virgil Tibbs
Virgil Tibbs is a Philadelphia homicide detective passing through Sparta, Mississippi, who is arrested at the railway station on suspicion of murder and then asked to help solve it.
Q 15Who played the prejudiced Mississippi police chief opposite Poitier in In the Heat of the Night?
Rod Steiger
Rod Steiger won the Best Actor Oscar for his gum-chewing Chief Bill Gillespie; the film took Best Picture and five Academy Awards in all, while Poitier was not even nominated.
Q 16In which state was In the Heat of the Night mostly filmed, despite being set in Mississippi?
Illinois
The town of Sparta, Illinois lent its name and its storefronts to the fictional Sparta, Mississippi.
Q 17What does Tibbs do when the plantation owner Endicott strikes him across the face?
He slaps him back
He slaps him back at once, a response Poitier said he had written into his contract so the scene could not be cut; the exchange stunned 1967 audiences.
Q 18Who performed the title song of In the Heat of the Night, over a score by Quincy Jones?
Ray Charles
Ray Charles sang the title song, written by Quincy Jones with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman; Jones's blues-flavoured score was one of the first major Hollywood scores by a Black composer.
Q 19In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Poitier is engaged to the daughter of which screen couple?
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn played the Draytons, parents of Katharine Houghton's Joey, in their ninth and final film together; Tracy died just over two weeks after finishing his scenes, and Hepburn won the Best Actress Oscar.
Q 20In To Sir, with Love, Poitier plays a teacher in which part of London?
The East End
The East End setting came from E. R. Braithwaite's autobiographical novel about teaching in a tough secondary school there; James Clavell directed Poitier as Mark Thackeray, the engineer turned teacher.
Blind
Blind since a childhood injury, Elizabeth Hartman's Selina D'Arcey does not know that Poitier's Gordon Ralfe is Black; their kissing scene was cut when the film played in the Southern United States.
Q 24What was Poitier's directorial debut in 1972?
Buck and the Preacher
Buck and the Preacher, a Western about freed slaves heading west after the Civil War, became Poitier's directing debut when he took over from Joseph Sargent a few days into shooting; Ruby Dee co-starred.
Q 25Which two comedians star in Stir Crazy (1980), long the top-grossing film by a Black director?
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor play Skip and Harry, New Yorkers framed for a bank robbery in Arizona and sentenced to 125 years; the comedy grossed over $100 million in North America on a $10 million budget.
Q 26With which comedian did Poitier make Uptown Saturday Night, Let's Do It Again and A Piece of the Action?
Bill Cosby
Bill Cosby co-starred in all three comedies, which Poitier also directed; in Uptown Saturday Night they play a factory worker and a cab driver chasing a stolen winning lottery ticket.
Q 27Poitier co-founded First Artists Production Company with Paul Newman and which other star?
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand joined Paul Newman and Poitier in founding First Artists in 1969, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman added later; the stars took no salary in exchange for creative control and a share of profits.
Q 28Which company rejected Poitier at his first audition because he could not read the script fluently?
The American Negro Theatre
The American Negro Theatre in Harlem turned him away after a stumbling first reading in 1945; an elderly Jewish waiter then spent months teaching him to read from the newspaper, and he was accepted on his return.
Q 29How did Poitier get out of the US Army in 1944?
He faked mental illness and confessed to a sympathetic psychiatrist
He faked mental illness and confessed to a sympathetic psychiatrist, who arranged his discharge in 1944; Poitier had lied about his age to enlist at 16 and was posted to a veterans' psychiatric hospital in Northport, New York.
Q 30Whose radio voice did Poitier model his famous speech pattern on, to shed his Bahamian accent?
Norman Brokenshire
Norman Brokenshire, a veteran radio announcer, was the voice Poitier copied for six months from a cheap radio, repeating phrases to flatten his Bahamian lilt before returning to audition.