Hollywood’s First Black Movie Star, Oscar-Winning Sidney Poitier Dies at 94

Sidney Poitier, Hollywood’s first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, has died at 94.

The news of his death comes from Clint Watson, press secretary for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas. Poitier came from an impoverished background in the Bahamas before embarking on his successful and pioneering acting career.

Poitier won the Oscar for 1963’s “Lilies of the Field,” and some of his most known films included “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” He often fulfilled movie roles that pushed 1950s and ’60s audiences to envision Black people as doctors, teachers, and detectives, not just stereotypical pigeonholes.

“(Blacks) were so new in Hollywood. There was almost no frame of reference for us except as stereotypical, one-dimensional characters,” Poitier told Oprah Winfrey in 2000. “I had in mind what was expected of me — not just what other Blacks expected but what my mother and father expected. And what I expected of myself.”

Over time, as the only Black leading man in 1960s Hollywood, Poitier became hailed as a representative symbol of his race. He endured criticism and scrutiny from every direction, including some Black people who said he betrayed their culture by taking sanitized roles to pander to non-Black audiences.

“It’s been an enormous responsibility,” Poitier explained. “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.”

In 2000, Poitier wrote his memoir, “The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography.” In 2001, he received an honorary Acadamy Award for his overall contribution to American cinema. And, before receiving the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s highest award in 2011, in 2009, President Obama awarded the acclaimed actor the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying, “It’s been said that Sidney Poitier does not make movies, he makes milestones … milestones of artistic excellence, milestones of America’s progress.”

—

Photo credit: Featureflash Photo Agency / Shutterstock.com