Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood’s first Black movie star, dies at 94
(CNN) – 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.
At the same time, as the lone Black leading man in 1960s Hollywood, he came under tremendous scrutiny. He was too often hailed as a noble symbol of his race and endured criticism from some Black people who said he had betrayed them by taking sanitized roles and pandering to Whites.
“It’s been an enormous responsibility,” Poitier told Oprah Winfrey in 2000. “And I accepted it, and I lived in a way that showed how I respected that responsibility. I had to. In order for others to come behind me, there were certain things I had to do.”
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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. https://t.co/og7GIoS7B3
— CNN (@CNN) January 7, 2022
Impossible to pick favorites but the first things I thought of were "To Sir With Love," "In the Heat of the Night" – which still makes me tense – and, oddly, "Shoot to Kill," an 80s action movie that's not great but that I liked. https://t.co/uJClC1aWFD
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 7, 2022
Legendary activist and actor Sidney Poitier passes away at the age of 94. CNN's Sara Sidner looks back at his groundbreaking career. https://t.co/rJKuh4kuoJ pic.twitter.com/WQQTNwkDMA
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) January 7, 2022
Man, a lot of greats are going fast lately. R.I.P. https://t.co/XluCRrlvRo
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) January 7, 2022
Poitier was a wonderful actor with an impressive body of work. He was a leading man at a time when blacks were relegated to roles as servants.
My favorite of his films was Lillies of the Field where he won an Oscar for Best Actor, also a first. This is my favorite part of the film.
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