Sidney Poitier

Sidney L. Poitier was born on the twentieth of February 1927 at Miami, Florida, the seventh and youngest child of Reginald James Poitier — a Bahamian tomato farmer — and Evelyn Outten Poitier, a Bahamian homemaker. The Poitier family was visiting Miami on a tomato-shipping run from Cat Island in the Bahamas when his mother went into premature labour. He weighed three pounds at birth and was given little chance of survival; he was raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas and on Nassau through his first fifteen years. He received only two years of formal schooling at the village school on Cat Island.

He returned to Miami at fifteen to live with his older brother Cyril and within months migrated to New York. He worked at sixteen as a dishwasher at a Lower East Side restaurant where a Jewish waiter taught him to read across the dinner shifts. He auditioned at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem in 1944 — was rejected — and across the following six months removed every trace of his Bahamian accent from his speech. He was re-auditioned and accepted as an understudy in late 1945.

He played Polydorus in the 1946 Broadway revival of Lysistrata, made his film debut in No Way Out (1950), and across the 1950s established himself as the principal Black leading man in serious Hollywood drama — Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), Blackboard Jungle (1955), Edge of the City (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958) — for which he received the 1958 Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, the first African American so nominated.

His decisive Academy Award came in 1964 for the 1963 Ralph Nelson film Lilies of the Field — the first African American to win the Best Actor in a Leading Role. In 1967 he starred in three of the highest-grossing American films of the year — To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — the only American actor to have placed three films in the top ten box-office returns of a single calendar year.

He directed nine films across the 1970s and 1980s — including Buck and the Preacher (1972), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let's Do It Again (1975), A Piece of the Action (1977) and Stir Crazy (1980) — and served from 1997 to 2007 as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. He was knighted by Elizabeth II in 1974 as Knight Commander of the British Empire.

He died at Beverly Hills on the sixth of January 2022, at ninety-four.

He is honored here as the first Black Best Actor Academy Award winner.