- Actor Sidney Poitier has died at the age of 94.
- This was announced by the Deputy Prime Minister of the Bahamas, where the actor grew up.
- Poitier was, among other things, the first African American actor to receive an Oscar for best actor in 1964.
“We have lost an icon, a hero, a mentor, a fighter and a national treasure,” wrote Deputy Prime Minister Chester Cooper on his Facebook page about the actor from “The Chain” or “In the Heat of the Night”, without naming the cause of his death. The Prime Minister of the Bahamas, Philip Davis, honored Poitier in a speech.
Poitier wrote film history
As a trailblazer for blacks, Poitier wrote Hollywood history: in 1964 he was the first African American to receive the Oscar for best leading actor for “Lilies in the Field”.
The then 37-year-old convinced the academy with the portrayal of a black worker on the farm of white nuns. Before him, only Hattie McDaniel had won an Oscar as a black woman in 1940 for her supporting role as housekeeper in the melodrama Gone With the Wind.
Legend:
Poitier at the award of his freedom medal in the White House.
Keystone / Archives
The farmer’s son, who grew up in the poorest of circumstances in the Bahamas, was knighted by the British Queen in 1974. In 2002 he received an honorary Oscar for his life’s work. In 2009, the then US President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the USA.
In the new Academy Museum in Los Angeles, which opened at the end of September 2021, the huge entrance hall was named after the legendary actor.
One of the highest paid actors
One of Poitier’s successes is that he was the first black man to kiss a white woman in a Hollywood film. The passionate scene in the 1967 film “Guess who comes to dinner” was filmed shamefully through the rear-view mirror of a taxi, but it belongs to the series of breakthroughs for which civil rights activists celebrated it and for which some activists of the Afro-American movement celebrated it but also for a long time reviled as conformist «white blacks».
Legend:
Poitiers star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Keystone
But the role offers for the actor came over and over, at the end of the 1960s Poitier was considered one of the highest paid film actors.
From dishwasher to superstar
As a teenager, Sidney Poitier had followed an older brother from the Bahamas to Florida. He made his way as a street seller, dishwasher and henchman. In New York he joined the American Negro Theater.
After small Broadway roles, he made his film debut in 1950 in “No Way Out” alongside Richard Widmark in a doctor role. The star from films such as “Escape in Chains”, “Porgy and Bess” and “A Spot in the Sun” made his last feature film in 1997 with the action thriller “The Jackal”.
On Twitter, fans mourn their idol