Vale: Sidney Poitier

Legendary and trailblazing actor Sidney Poitier, best known for the films To Sir with Love, Lilies of the Field, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and The Defiant Ones, has died, aged 94.

His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Poitier was raised.

“We’ve lost a great a Bahamian and I’ve lost a personal friend,” he said.

Poitier, who held dual US and Bahamian nationality, was “an icon, a hero, a mentor, a fighter, a national treasure,” Deputy Prime Minister Chester Cooper said on his official Facebook page.

Poitier was automatically granted US citizenship after being unexpectedly born in Miami while his parents were visiting. As a young actor he got his first break when he met the casting director of the American Negro Theater. Poitier later broke racial barriers as the first black winner of the best actor Oscar and inspired a generation during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Three films in 1967 included Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner where he played a black man with a white fiancee and In the Heat of the Night (later adapted for television) he was Virgil Tibbs, a black police officer confronting racism during a murder investigation. He also played a teacher in a tough London school that year in To Sir, With Love.

He won his history-making best actor Oscar for Lilies of the Field in 1963, playing a handyman who helps German nuns build a chapel in the desert.

Five years before that Poitier had been the first black man nominated for a lead actor Oscar for his role in The Defiant Ones.

His other classic films of that era included A Patch of Blue, The Blackboard Jungle, A Raisin in the Sun, and two sequels for In the Heat of the Night: They Call Me Mister Tibbs! and The Organization.

Other film credits included  Buck and the Preacher, Shoot to Kill, Little Nikita, Sneakers and The Jackal whilst he directed films including Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again, A Piece of the Action, Stir Crazy and Hanky Panky.

There were also several telemovies, Separate but Equal, Mandela and de Klerk, To Sir With Love II, The Last Brickmaker in America, David and Lisa, The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn and Free of Eden. 

Poitier won the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1982 and SAG’s life achievement award in 2000. In 1992, he became the first Black recipient of the American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement award. He was ranked 22nd on the AFI list of the “25 Greatest Male Stars of All Time” in 1999. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and in 2002 an honorary Oscar “for his extraordinary performances and unique presence on the screen and for representing the industry with dignity, style and intelligence.”

In 2009, Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

Tributes have been made by Hollywood stars following his death.

“If you wanted the sky i would write across the sky in letters that would soar a thousand feet high.. To Sir… with Love Sir Sidney Poitier R.I.P. He showed us how to reach for the stars,” Whoopi Goldberg wrote on Twitter.

“The dignity, normalcy, strength, excellence and sheer electricity you brought to your roles showed us that we, as Black folks, mattered!!!,” Viola Davis tweeted.

Source: ABC, Variety, news.com.au