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“Sidney Poitier was the epitome of Black Dignity, Black beauty, Black pride and Black power” by “NY Times” Charles M. Blow
Sidney Poitier family issues statement on his death: “he is our guiding light.”
“Sidney L. Poitier KBE, February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022, RIP Sidney Poitier was a Bahamian-American actor, film director, activist, and ambassador. In 1964, he was the first black person and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two Academy Award nominations, ten Golden Globes nominations, two Primetime Emmy Awards nominations, six BAFTA nominations, eight Laurel nominations, and one Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG) nomination.
Poitier’s entire family lived in the Bahamas, then still a British colony, but he was born unexpectedly in Miami while they were visiting for the weekend, which automatically granted him US citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved to Miami at age 15, and to New York City when he was 16. He joined the American Negro Theater, landing his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955) . In 1958, Poitier starred with Tony Curtis as chained-together escaped convicts in The Defiant Ones, which received nine Academy Award nominations. Both actors received a nomination for Best Actor, with Poitier’s being the first for a Black actor, as well as a nomination for a BAFTA, which Poitier won. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), playing a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel.
Poitier also received acclaim for Porgy and Bess (1959), A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965). He continued to break ground in three successful 1967 films which dealt with issues of race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night. He received Golden Globe and British Academy Film Award nominations for his performance in the last film and in a poll the next year was voted the US’s top box-office star. Beginning in the 1970s, Poitier also directed various comedy films, including Stir Crazy (1980), starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, among other films. After nearly a decade away from acting, he returned to television and film starring in Shoot to Kill (1988) and Sneakers (1992).
Photo credit Alamy
Poitier was granted a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. In 1995, he received the Kennedy Center Honor. From 1997 to 2007, he was the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. In 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. In 2016, he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding lifetime achievement in film. In 1999, he ranked 22nd among male actors on the “100 Years…100 Stars” list by the American Film Institute. He won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2001. In 1982, he received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award and in 2000, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.[12][13] In 2002, he was given an Honorary Academy Award, in recognition of his “remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being”’. Wikipedia
Photo credit United Artists: In the Heat of the Night