Julia Louis-Dreyfus recalls sweet childhood encounter with Sidney Poitier
Julia Louis-Dreyfus has recounted a sweet encounter she had with Sidney Poitier back in 1969.
Poitier, the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, died at the age of 94 on Thursday.
On Saturday, Louis-Dreyfus took to Instagram to share a photo of the film icon, and in the accompanying caption, shared a story about how she met him for the first time on the night Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 spaceflight.
"In the middle of the night, when I was eight years old, I was given a white rose by the most elegant man I would ever meet. I was in Tunisia traveling with my family - my father worked with the '60s equivalent of Doctors Without Borders. At two in the morning, my mom woke me up and, in our nightgowns, we went to the lobby of the Tunis Hilton where they had set up a little black and white television on which at 2:56 am, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Afterwards, we headed outside to look up through the hot summer night at the never-again-the-same moon in the sky," she remembered. "What could possibly top THAT? Well, it was when we returned to the lobby, and that handsome elegant stranger gave to me and each woman present a white rose to commemorate this historic evening. My mom, in something of a swoon, explained to me that this was not just any man, this was Sydney (sic) Poitier. What a gesture. What a gentleman. Rest in peace."
Other celebrities to honour Poitier over the weekend included Oprah Winfrey, Halle Berry, Octavia Spencer, Whoopi Goldberg, and Martin Scorsese.
