Home ›› 09 Jan 2022 ›› Show Biz
Sidney Poitier, who broke through racial barriers as the first Black winner of the best actor Oscar for his role in ‘Lilies of the Field,’ and inspired a generation during the civil rights movement, has died at age 94, Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said on Friday.
Poitier created a distinguished film legacy in a single year with three 1967 films at a time when segregation prevailed in much of the United States.
In ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ he played a Black man with a white fiancee and ‘In the Heat of the Night’ 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.’
Poitier had 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 Tibbs character from ‘In the Heat of the Night’ was immortalized in two sequels – ‘They Call Me Mister Tibbs!’ in 1970 and ‘The Organization’ in 1971 - and became the basis of the television series “In the Heat of the Night” starring Carroll O’Connor and Howard Rollins.
His other classic films of that era included ‘A Patch of Blue’ in 1965 in which his character was befriended by a blind white girl, ‘The Blackboard Jungle’ and ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ which Poitier also performed on Broadway.
Poitier was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 1974 and served as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan and to UNESCO, the UN cultural agency. He also sat on Walt Disney Co’s board of directors from 1994 to 2003.
