He was the first Black male artist to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Trailblazing Hollywood icon Sidney Poitier, the first Black male performer to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, died on Thursday. He was 94. The Bahamian-American actor’s demise was announced by the Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell on Friday. Poitier’s acting roles and the films he directed paved the path for generations of Black actors and directors. He received a string of accolades and awards over a career that spanned seven decades. These include two more Oscar nominations, two Primetime Emmy Awards nominations and six BAFTA nominations. Poitier also received an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II in 1974 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States government in 2009. He was born Sidney L Poitier on February 20, 1927. After appearances in stage productions, Poitier drew good notices for his role in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s No Way Out in 1950. He played an African American doctor who confronts racism in a small town. Poitier would go on to be that rare thing in Hollywood – a Black leading man. Richard Brooks’s coming-of-age drama Blackboard Jungle (1955) saw Poitier in the key role of a troubled but talented student at a multi-racial school. In Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), a Black and a White convict escape while being shackled together and must learn to co-exist until they can free themselves.
