Trailblazing actor, filmmaker and Hollywood icon Sidney Poitier has passed away at the age of 94, it has been announced today.
Born prematurely to Bahamian parents during a visit to Miami in 1927, Poitier was raised in the Bahamas and moved to the United States aged 15. After a stint in the Army, Poitier joined the American Negro Theater, beginning a legendary 71-year career which – among a host of other honours – would see him becoming the first black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Poitier made his screen debut in 1950 with a lead role in director Joseph Mankiewicz and producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s No Way Out, and he would follow this with films like Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Defiant Ones (1958), Porgy and Bess (1959) and A Raisin in the Sun (1961), earning Golden Globe nominations for the latter two before his ground-breaking Oscar-winning turn in 1963’s Lilies of the Field.
Following his Academy Award win, Poitier became the biggest box office draw in Hollywood with a trio of hits in 1967 in To Sir, with Love, In the Heart of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and by the 1970s he was directing his own pictures, including Buck and the Preacher (1972) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974).
In later years, Poitior made sporadic appearances, with roles in films such as Shoot to Kill (1988), Sneakers (1992) and his final feature The Jackal (1997), as well as directing the likes of Stir Crazy (1980) and Ghost Dad (1990). In 2002, he was the recipient of the Academy Honorary Award for “remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being.”
