Sidney L. Poitier KBE was a Bahamian-American actor, film director, activist, and ambassador. In 1964, he was the first black person and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
He joined the American Negro Theater, 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. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), playing a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel.
Poitier also received acclaim for A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965). He continued to break ground in three successful 1967 films which dealt with issues of race and race relations: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night.
On January 6, 2022, Poitier died at his home in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 94.
