Celebrities who left behind a legacy

2021 was a year of great losses to the entertainment industry, from singers to actors to musicians to directors, producers and playwrights, the loss was immeasurable. And 3 weeks into 2022 Hollywood is mourning over the deaths of some of the most iconic stars it had. From losing Betty White on the last day of 2021 to losing Sir Sidney Poitier and Bob Saget last week, we’re bidding farewell to the stars we’ve lost this month. 

Betty White

With a career spanning over 8 decades, Betty White was a pioneer for early television noted for her vast work in the entertainment industry and to work both in front of and behind the camera. Known as the First Lady of Television, White started by acting on various radio shows in the 1940’s, and by 1949 she had starting appearing on television regularly in Hollywood on Television as a ‘girl Friday,’ the show that she later became the host for. With ample of experience in her pocket White then co-founded Bandy Projects to work on her independent projects. She was the first woman to produce a sitcom in the United States called Life with Elizabeth where she played the title role and the sitcom continued for 3 years. She went on to be known for her comedic work in numerous sitcoms, most notably The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls.

In 2010 White experienced a major surge in popularity, fueled in part by a humorous Super Bowl commercial in which she was tackled during a recreational football game. Fans subsequently launched a Facebook campaign to have the 88-year-old actress host Saturday Night Live. In May 2010 she became the comedy show’s oldest host, and received an Emmy Award for her performance.

Although much of her work was for television, White also appeared in several movies. In 1962 she made her feature-film debut in Advise & Consent, and her later movies included the thriller Lake Placid (1999) and the romantic comedies The Proposal (2009) and You Again (2010). In 2019 she voiced the character Bitey White, a teething ring, in the animated feature Toy Story 4. In addition to her acting career, White was famous as an animal rights activist. She penned the memoirs Here We Go Again: My Life in Television (1995) and If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t) (2011). Her audiobook recording of the latter won a Grammy Award for best spoken-word album. The actress passed away in her sleep on December 31, 2021, at the age of 99, two and a half weeks before her 100th birthday.

Sidney Poitier

Poitier broke the mold of what a Black actor could be in Hollywood. Before the 1950s, Black movie characters generally reflected racist stereotypes such as lazy servants and beefy mammies. Then came Poitier, the only Black man to consistently win leading roles in major films from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field, in 1964 for playing Homer Smith, a traveling handyman who builds a chapel for German nuns out of the goodness of his heart. The sweet, low-budget movie was a surprise hit that catapulted him to fame.

Poitier peaked in 1967 with three of the year’s most notable movies, To Sir, With Love, in which he starred as a school teacher who wins over his unruly students at a London Secondary School; In the Heat of the Night, as the determined police detective Virgil Tibbs; and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, as the prominent doctor who wishes to marry a young white woman he only recently met.

Theater owners named Poitier the No. 1 star of 1967, the first time a Black actor topped the list. In 2009 President Barack Obama, whose own steady bearing was sometimes compared to Poitier’s, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying that the actor “not only entertained but enlightened… revealing the power of the silver screen to bring us closer together.”

His screen career faded in the late 1960s as political movements became more radical and movies more explicit. He acted less often, gave fewer interviews and began directing, his credits including the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder farce Stir Crazy, Buck and the Preacher and the Bill Cosby comedies Uptown Saturday Night and Let’s Do It Again. He was granted a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974 for his work.

In the 1980s and ’90s, he appeared in the feature films Sneakers and The Jackal and several television movies, receiving an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination. In recent years, a new generation learned of him through Oprah Winfrey, who chose The Measure of a Man for her book club. Poitier died at his home in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 94 on January 6, 2022 leaving behind an unmatched legacy.

Bob Saget

Bob Saget, the comedian and actor arguably known best by audiences as wholesome patriarch Danny Tanner from the sitcom Full House, also left for his abode on January 9, 2022 after he was found dead in his hotel room during his tour. Born and brought up in Pennsylvania, Saget pursued his acting studies in the Temple University and it was there that he created his first work called Through Adam’s Eyes, which won him an award of merit in the Student Academy Awards.

Following a short stint as a member of CBS’ The Morning Program in early 1987, Saget was cast as Danny Tanner in Full House, which became a success with family viewers, later returning for Fuller House starting in 2016. In 1989, Saget began as the host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, a role he held until 1997. During the early 1990s, Saget worked on both Full House and AFV simultaneously. In 2009, he returned to AFV for the 20th-anniversary one-hour special co-hosted with Tom Bergeron.

Throughout his career, Saget also focused on directing, including on HBO’s The Mind of the Married Man, and the Norm Macdonald film Dirty Work. He drew praise as producer-director of the 1996 TV film For Hope, loosely based on the battle of his late sister, Gay, with the tissue disease scleroderma, and appealed for increased federal support for research funds.

In more recent years he found fame among younger generations as the narrator of the hit show How I Met Your Mother and for his guest stints as a highly fictionalised version of himself in the TV series, Entourage.