Sidney Poitier, trailblazing Black film star and activist, dead at 94
>>NEW YORK: Sidney Poitier, who has died at age 94, was a pioneering Black movie star who opened doors for racial minorities in film decades before the #OscarsSoWhite and Black Lives Matter movements.
The trailblazing thespian became the first male Black star nominated for an Academy Award with 1958’s The Defiant Ones and, six years later, was the first to win the best actor Oscar for his performance in Lilies of the Field.
Collecting his historic award, Poitier told the glamorous audience of mainly white contemporaries it had been “a long journey to this moment” — but his achievement would not be matched until 38 years later, when Denzel Washington won for his leading role in Training Day.
Poitier, who died Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles, achieved mainstream popularity with a series of groundbreaking roles at a time of great racial tension in America in the 1950s and 1960s.
He balanced success with a sense of duty to choose projects that tackled bigotry and stereotypes, including his 1967 classics Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
and In the Heat of the Night.
Poitier was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2002 for his “extraordinary performances” on the silver screen and his “dignity, style and intelligence” off of it.
“I accept this award in the name of all the African American actors and actresses who went before me in the difficult years and on whose shoulders I was privileged to stand to see where I might go,” Poitier said.
By coincidence, Poitier received his 2002 honorary Oscar the same night Washington won for best actor, which was also the night Halle Berry become the first, and only, African American best actress winner.
Born in the southern US state of Florida in 1927 where his tomato farmer father was selling his produce, young Sidney and his family moved back to the Bahamas, where he grew up in poverty.
A dual national of the Bahamas and United States, he got his first taste of the cinema as a youth before dropping out of school at the age of 13 and returning to Miami at 15 to join his brother Cyril.
Poitier soon relocated to New York where he worked as a dishwasher and busboy, reportedly sleeping in bus station pay toilets to survive.
During World War II, he joined the US Army as a physiotherapist until 1945, when he returned to New York, his heart set on becoming an actor.
He was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009.