USA: The legendary Oscar actor Sidney Poitier has died

January 7, 2022

Robert

The legendary American actor Sir Sidney Poitier passed away at the age of 94. He was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1963 film Lillies of the Field. She was the first African-American actress to receive this award (24 years after the victory of Hattie McDaniel, who was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1939). Poitier was also a director, writer and diplomat.

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Sidney Poitier was born in Miami, Florida. Poitier grew up on the Caribbean island of Kat and then moved to Miami, where his parents, Reginald James Poitier and Evelyn Auden, traveled to sell tomatoes and other farm produce to Katie Island two months ago. The baby’s survival rate was minimal, which is why his parents stayed in the US for three months. to take care of him. Thus the actor automatically received American citizenship. At the age of 10 his parents moved to Nassau in the Bahamas and at the age of 15 his parents sent him to Miami to live with his brother.

He later decided to enlist in the US Army and when he was fired he underwent a successful audition, through which he got a job at the American Negro Theater.

In 2002, the actor was awarded an Honorary Oscar by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his achievements as an artist, but also as a man, and in 2009 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama.

The actor was married to Juanita Hardy from 1950 until 1965, the couple had 4 daughters. He married for the second time in 1976 to the actress Joanna Simcus, with whom he had 2 daughters.

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Poitier began his performances at the American Negro Theater without success. His second attempt at the theater was successful and led him to the leading role in the play Lysistrata (based on the comedy of the same name by Aristophanes) on Broadway, which gave him good reviews. There he was spotted by 20th Century Fox director Daryl F. Zanuk, who hired him to star in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film No Way Out (1949) as a doctor threatened by a white man. played by Richard Windmark. His performance led him to more roles, most of which were notable, than those offered to other African-American actors of the period. He established himself with his role in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955), where he appeared as a student of an incompetent class alongside Glenn Ford.

Poitier was the first African-American actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his 1958 film The Defiant Ones. He was also the first actor to win the award (for the film Lillies of the Field (1963). It was preceded by the Hattie McDaniel Awards, which won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Gone With the Wind (1939), and the James Basketball Academy Award, which won an Academy Award for his performance in The T South (Song of the South)). Despite his victory, Poitier feared that the film industry would award him the prize only to impress the crowds and prevent him from making bigger and more important demands in the future.[15]. The year after his victory, he worked hard and remained the only African-American actor in Hollywood to be successful, but the roles offered to him were indifferent.

In 1959 the actor appeared on Broadway in the play A Grape in the Sun, a play which was then successfully transferred to the big screen starring himself. In 1965 he gave memorable performances in the films Sink U-128 (The Bedford Incident) and Blind Angel (A Patch of Blue) alongside Elizabeth Hartmann and Shelley Winters. 1967 proved to be his most commercial year with three of his most popular films of the year: In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Our Lord with Love ( To Sir, with Love). In the movie The Story of a Crime he got one of his most popular roles, as a police officer Virgil Timps. The character of Thibbs appeared in two other films starring Poitier, They Call Me MISTER Tibbs !, 1970, and The Organization (1971), which did not have the success of the original. In 1968 he wrote the screenplay for For Love of Ivy, where he also starred.