WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win the Oscar for Best Actor in Hollywood, has died at the age of 94, an official at the Bahamian Islands Foreign Office said on Friday, where he had grown up.
Interpreter of “Seed of violence”, “Porgy and Bess”, “Guess who’s coming to dinner” or “In the heat of the night”, Sidney Poitier was the first African-American actor to win an Oscar, in 1963, for his role in “Le Lys des champs”.
Of Haitian origin, he was born February 20, 1927 in Miami and then grew up in the Bahamas. He had joined his brother in the United States as a teenager to get into the theater.
Defender of civil rights, respected by the white American community, he had been keen to choose roles illustrating this cause, as in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967).
In 1972, Sidney Poitier decided to go behind the camera, making a total of seven films, including “Uptown Saturday Night”.
His last film appearance was in 1988, in “The Jackal” with Bruce Willis.
(Katharine Jackson, French version Tangi Salaün and Sophie Louet, edited by Bertrand Boucey)
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