Sidney Poitier, the first black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Performance, died Thursday, thanks to him for changing how black people appear on screen.
Poitier, a US citizen, from the Bahamas, was the first black actor to achieve record earnings at the box office, at the age of 94.
Poitier, who won a Best Actor Oscar in 1964 for “Lilies of the Field,” is set in the Bahamas, according to Eugene Turchon Newry, acting director general of the Bahamas Department of Foreign Affairs.
Before the emergence of Poitier, the son of tomato growers in the Bahamas, no black actor had sustainably pursued a career in acting or had major roles.
The rise of Poitier reflected major changes in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
Poitier plays a fugitive black convict who befriends a white racist prisoner, played by Tony Curtis, in The Defined Ones.
Nat “King” Cole and Oscar winner Sidney Poitier at the Academy Awards at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, April 8, 1963. pic.twitter.com/DVwMvQ6Piy
– Skip_Bolden ???? ????️ ???? (@BoldenSkip) January 1, 2022
He also played a court clerk who falls in love with a blind white girl in “A Pets of Blue” and as a handyman who builds a church for a group of nuns in “Lilies of the Field.”
In one of his biggest roles on stage and screen, Poitier played an ambitious young father whose dreams collide with those of other family members in “A Resin in the Sun.”
The Associated Press said that whenever a discussion of diversity in Hollywood ended with a mention of Poitier.
With his handsome face and disciplined style, Poitier was for years not only the most popular black film star, but the only one.