Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood's first Black movie star, dies at 94

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Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood's first Black movie star, dies at 94

By Brandon Griggs,

CNN Updated 9:01 AM EST,  Sat January 08, 2022

 

Sidney Poitier, whose elegant bearing and principled onscreen characters made him Hollywood's first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, has died. He was 94.

 

Clint Watson, press secretary for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, confirmed to CNN that Poitier died Thursday evening.

 

Poitier overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas and softened his thick island accent to rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent roles for Black actors were rare. He won the Oscar for 1963's "Lilies of the Field," in which he played an itinerant laborer who helps a group of White nuns build a chapel.

 

Many of his best-known films explored racial tensions as Americans were grappling with social changes wrought by the civil rights movement. In 1967 alone, he appeared as a Philadelphia detective fighting bigotry in small-town Mississippi in "In the Heat of the Night" and a doctor who wins over his White fiancée's skeptical parents in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."

 

Poitier's movies struggled for distribution in the South, and his choice of roles was limited to what White-run studios would produce. Racial taboos, for example, precluded him from most romantic parts. But his dignified roles helped audiences of the 1950s and 1960s envision Black people not just as servants but as doctors, teachers and detectives.

 

See report and interview 

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/07/entertainment/sidney-poitier-death/index.html