RIP - BREAKING: Beloved Bahamian actor and former ambassador Sir Sidney Poitier has died.

kes1111

Rising Star
BGOL Investor



Sidney L. Poitier KBE (/ˈpwɑːtieɪ/; born February 20, 1927) is a Bahamian-American retired actor, film director, activist, and ambassador. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Black male and Bahamian actor to win the award.[2] He has had two further Academy Award nominations, ten Golden Globes nominations, two Primetime Emmy Awards nominations, six BAFTA nominations, eight Laurel nominations, and one Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination. Upon the death of Kirk Douglas in 2020, Poitier became one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, and the oldest living and earliest surviving male Academy Award winner. From 1997 to 2007, Poitier served as Bahamian Ambassador to Japan.[3]

Poitier's entire family lived in the Bahamas, then still a British colony, but he was born unexpectedly in Miami while they were visiting for the weekend, which automatically granted him U.S. citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved back to Miami at age 15, and to New York when he was 16. He joined the North American Negro Theatre, landing his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955). In 1958, Poitier starred with Tony Curtis as chained-together escaped convicts in The Defiant Ones, which received nine Academy Award nominations. Both actors received a nomination for Best Actor, with Poitier's being the first for a Black actor, as well as a nomination for a BAFTA, which Poitier won. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor[4][a] for Lilies of the Field (1963) playing a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel.
 

OmariAmaru

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
2022 starting out with a vengeance. Said in another thread, memories and icons of my childhood are fading like tears in the rain. R.I.P. to the man that showed people of color, especially black men, that you can see the reflection of yourself on the big screen in a positive, dignified, and respectable manner. That slap to that white man face in 1967 spoke volumes. Damn!
 
Top