Black PR Wire Power Profiler on Sidney Poitier
Hollywood icon Sidney Poitier was the first African American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, receiving the honor in 1964 for his performance in “Lilies of the Field.” A native of Nassau, Bahamas, Sidney Poitier also directed several films, including “Buck and the Preacher” and “Stir Crazy.”
Poitier made his Hollywood debut in the 1950 feature film “No Way Out,” and he followed in 1951 with “Cry, the Beloved Country,” a drama set in South Africa during the time of apartheid. He enjoyed a career breakthrough in 1955 with the popular “Blackboard Jungle,” portraying a troubled but gifted student at an inner-city school.
Poitier's success as an actor reached new heights when he scored an Academy Award nomination for the 1958 crime drama “The Defiant Ones,” with Tony Curtis. The following year, he lit up the screen as a leading man in the musical “Porgy and Bess,” co-starring with Dorothy Dandridge. Both this film and his impressive turn in the 1961 film adaptation of “A Raisin in the Sun” helped make the actor a top star.
In 1967, Poitier delivered three very different yet equally strong performances. He played Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs in the Southern crime drama “In the Heat of the Night.” In “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner” he played a Black man engaged to a white woman in this groundbreaking look at interracial marriage. He also starred as inner-city teacher Mark Thackeray in the British film “To Sir, with Love.” The film finds Thackeray navigating racial and socioeconomic friction between rebellious and unruly students and winning their respect in the end. He played U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in “Separate but Equal” in 1991 and opposite Michael Caine as South African leader Nelson Mandela in “Mandela and De Klerk” in 1997.
Turning his attention to sharing his many personal experiences, Poitier, in 2000, published “The Measure of a Man,” which was billed as a spiritual autobiography. That same year, he picked up a Grammy Award for best spoken word album for the audio version of the book. He later shared his years of wisdom for future generations with 2008's “Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter.”
Poitier received numerous honors during his legendary career. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1974, which entitled him to use the title "sir," though he chose not to do so. In 2009, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Two years later, he was feted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, earning the organization's Chaplin Lifetime Achievement Award. Poitier also served as non-resident Bahamian ambassador to Japan and to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.