LOS ANGELES -- There are two versions of how Lee Grant came to direct Sidney Poitier: One Bright Light, a biography of her In the Heat of the Night co-star, on PBS's American Masters tonight at 8 p.m.
"I am a very private person and was not necessarily interested in doing this, but I came to it with a respect built over many years for her integrity as an artist and as a human being," Poitier says.
Grant recalls another scenario.
"I cried. I whined and I cried several times, and finally he said, 'Oh, OK.' " she says.
The 72-year-old actor has starred in such notable films as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, To Sir with Love and The Defiant Ones.
Grant wished to tell the tale between takes. As she says: "The journey Sidney Poitier took from childhood on Cat Island (in the Bahamas), without running water; to Florida, where the Klan was after him when he was 15, to New York, where he was a dishwasher listening to the radio to get rid of his accent."
Poitier won the Academy Award for Lilies of the Field and remains the only black actor to win either a best actor or actress Oscar.
"This is an extraordinary story of a phenomenal man. I'm talking about the Jackie Robinson of film," Grant says. "My question was: Why Sidney? Why was he the one to make that journey as a young black actor?"
Grant and Poitier shared a professional history in more than one sense, she says. There was a bit of a parallel between their careers.
"I'm, in a minor way, in kind of a situation that Sidney was in. Twenty years ago when I decided to direct, there were only two other women directors," says Grant, who also directed Camryn Manheim and Kimberly Elise in last month's ABC movie The Loretta Claiborne Story.
Of course, the Sidney Poitier story is more than one of career adversity.
"My own struggles in my career with racism? It's not so much my career, but my life. I mean, it's been a part of my life," he says.
"When I'm off the screen and when I'm in Hollywood, it was a condition of my life as it was a condition for a lot of other people."
Poitier knows racism has never been, nor likely ever will be, erased from society.
He does, however, acknowledge conditions have changed greatly in Hollywood.
"The presence of Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Samuel Jackson, Wesley Jackson, James Earl Jones and people like that -- clear evidence that there's been some change," Poitier says.
"The question would have to be: How much change? Certainly we're not home yet."
Poitier will be further recognized for his work on March 12, when he is to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild.
Poitier points out his career is far from over.
"I haven't hung up my shingle yet. The last thing I did was a film for CBS called The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn. And I have been writing," he says.
Poitier is working what he calls his "spiritual autobiography," which is a more philosophical examination of life than the autobiography he published during the '70s
And not to be overlooked, Poitier also serves as the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan.
"I've been trying to deepen the experience of living in the moment. That sounds a little weird, I know," he says. "When you get to be as old as I am, you become very possessive of your most important asset -- which is time."
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