In 1950, 33-year-old black actor Sidney Poitier starred for the first time in Hollywood history in a film by Joseph Mankiewicz with the prescient title "The Door Opens". When he made his film debut a decade earlier, the self-taught young man, who grew up in the Bahamas before emigrating to New York as a teenager, was not allowed to eat his meals with the rest of the uniformly white studio staff. His character as a young surgeon confronted with racism revealed the hero's potential in a man who, until then, had only played the subordinate roles assigned to "people of color". With just a few carefully selected roles, Sidney Poitier, a staunch activist for the civil rights movement alongside his friend Harry Belafonte, became a star.