Sidney Poitier, the trailblazing and iconic actor, director, civil rights activist, and humanitarian, has died, the Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs announced Friday.
Details of his death were not immediately available.
The first Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor — for 1964’s Lilies of the Field — Poitier was a towering figure in Hollywood and beyond, starring in such classics as A Raisin in the Sun, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and To Sir With Love, to name a select few, while taking on a global profile for his unceasing calls for civil rights, racial equality, and human dignity.
Offscreen, Poitier’s work and support for civil rights in the 1960s put him at the forefront of the movement and made him one of its most prominent public faces. He attended, along with his lifelong friend Harry Belafonte, the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s delivered the historic “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1967, King would say of Poitier, “He is a man of great depth, a man of great social concern, a man who is dedicated to human rights and freedom.”
“He was to Hollywood what Jackie Robinson was to baseball,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton today. “He broke the color barrier at the top level. The first Black to win an Oscar for acting. And I think that this country, this world, and certainly the world of cinema could never pay the debt that is owed to Sidney Poitier.”
Born into a large Bahamian family while his parents were visiting Miami, Poitier grew up in the Bahamas but moved to America when he was 15, settling in New York City a year later. He later joined the North American Negro Theatre, beginning a stage career that would reach a peak in 1959 with his powerful, Tony-nominated performance as Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. As an inner-city Chicago man struggling to provide for his family and faced with the decision of how to spend an inheritance, Poitier gave a career-making performance that he would reprise in the now-classic 1961 film version.
Poitier would return to Broadway, briefly, as a director in 1968 with the short-lived racial satire Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, starring Louis Gosset, Cicely Tyson, Johnny Brown, Diane Ladd, and David Steinberg. But it was in the film that the actor and director would make his most profound mark. As early as 1950, Poitier was being courted by Hollywood with a role in No Way Out. Within five years he was starring in Blackboard Jungle.
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