Sidney Poitier: Hollywood’s First Black Movie Star Dies at 94!
One of Hollywood’s finest actors, Sidney Poitier, has departed from the stage for the eternal light that will shine over the glamour and glitz of Hollywood film and entertainment. Sidney Poitier leaves us with many memorable films that opened the door for black actors today…
CelebnMusic247.com, CelebnMovies247.com and CelebnHealth247.com says goodbye to a legendary actor who graced us with his remarkable talent on screen and his distinguished good looks and class off camera.
Sidney Poitier was the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, has died. He was 94.
Clint Watson, who is the press secretary for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, relayed to Forbes that Poitier died of “natural causes” on Thursday.
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 refused to take roles he felt were demeaning!
Mr. Poitier’s roles as a reverend in the apartheid drama “Cry, the Beloved Country,” a troubled student in “Blackboard Jungle” and an escaped prisoner in “The Defiant Ones,” in which he and Tony Curtis were shackled together and forced to get along to survive. With that 1958 film, Poitier became the first Black man to be nominated for an Oscar.
Mr. Poitier will always be remembered.
RIP Sidney
