actor
Hollywood star Sidney Poitier has died at the age of 94
Sidney Poitier. Photo: Paul Buck/EPA/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first African American to receive the Oscar for best actor. Now the Hollywood star has died at the age of 94.
Hollywood star Sidney Poitier is dead. He died at the age of 94, as an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Bahamas confirmed to the German Press Agency on Friday. The country’s prime minister, Philip Davis, paid tribute to Poitier in a speech.
As a trailblazer for blacks, Poitier wrote Hollywood history: in 1964 he was the first African American to receive the Oscar for best leading actor for “Lilies in the Field”. The then 37-year-old convinced the academy with the portrayal of a black worker on the farm of white nuns. Before him, only Hattie McDaniel had won an Oscar as a black woman in 1940 for her supporting role as housekeeper in the melodrama Gone With the Wind.
The farmer’s son, who grew up in the poorest of circumstances in the Bahamas, was knighted by the British Queen in 1974. In 2002 he received an honorary Oscar for his life’s work. In 2009 the then US President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the USA. In the new Academy Museum in Los Angeles, which opened at the end of September 2021, the huge entrance hall was named following the legendary actor.
One of Poitier’s successes is that he was the first black man to kiss a white woman in a Hollywood film. The passionate scene in the 1967 film “Guess who comes to dinner” was filmed shamefully through the rear-view mirror of a taxi, but it belongs to the series of breakthroughs for which civil rights activists celebrated it and for which some activists of the Afro-American movement celebrated it but also long reviled as conformist «white blacks». But the role offers for the actor came over and over, at the end of the 1960s Poitier was considered one of the highest paid film actors.
As a teenager, Sidney Poitier had followed an older brother from the Bahamas to Florida. He made his way as a street vendor, dishwasher and henchman. In New York he joined the American Negro Theater. After small Broadway roles, he made his film debut in 1950 in “No Way Out” alongside Richard Widmark in a doctor role. The star from films such as “Escape in Chains”, “Porgy and Bess” and “A Spot in the Sun” made his last feature film in 1997 with the action thriller “The Jackal”.