Sidney Poitier, the actor and activist who smashed through the color barrier by being the very first black actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor, has died at the age of 94 with a cause of death yet to be announced. TMZ has confirmed Poitier’s death through the office of the Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs this morning.
Sidney Poitier’s Life & Career
Sidney L. Poitier was brought into this world in Miami, Florida on February 20, 1927, to parents Evelyn and Reginald James Poitier. Originally farmers from the Bahamas who were just visiting Miami to sell their produce, they got an unexpected surprise when Poitier was born two months prematurely. This led the doctors to believe the boy may not survive, so they both decided to stay in Miami for a handful of months until their new son was nursed back to health.
Poitier was the youngest of seven children, whom he got to meet when he arrived back in the Bahamas. Then, 10 years later, the family moved to Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. Here Poitier drove his first car, experienced the magic of electricity, and got his first taste of motion pictures.
After being sent to live with his brother’s family in Miami at the age of 15, he went to New York a year later and worked as a dishwasher and was taught to read by one of the waiters he worked with.
Wanting to serve his country, he lied about his age to enlist in the Army and was assigned to a Veteran’s Administration hospital in Northport, New York, where they trained him to work with psychiatric patients.
He would later be discharged and end up washing dishes again until he landed a role at an American Negro Theater production, where he was first not liked by the audiences due to his inability to sing. Unfortunately, this was because he was tone-deaf. But with every role he got, he garnered more attention, which led to more roles in motion pictures.
Poitier would go on to garner more motion picture roles while he also worked more in on-stage productions through the late 1940s and into the early 1960s, when he won The Oscar for Best Actor for his role in the 1963 comedy-drama, Lilies of the Field. In the picture, Poitier played a traveling worker by the name of Homer Smith who met up with a gaggle of East German nuns who believed that he was sent to them by God himself to build them a new chapel.
His last acting credit would come in 2001 when he played Henry Cobb in the 2001 made-for-TV movie, The Last Brickmaker in America. Beyond all Sidney Poitier’s work as an actor, activist, and director, Poitier was also the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2007.
