Sidney poitier obituary

Sidney poitier obituary new york times
Is sidney poitier still alive today
Sir Sidney knighted in 1974.

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Sidney Poitier: The extraordinary story of how the late icon learnt to read for his first foray into acting

Sidney Poitier, the first ever Black man to win a Best Actor Oscar, has died, aged 94.

The news was announced by Minister of Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell, prompting tributes from the world of entertainment.

Bahamian-American star Poitier was automatically granted US citizenship after being unexpectedly born in Miami while his parents were visiting in February 1927.

He grew up in the Bahamas but moved to America when he was 15, and served in World War Two as a teen after lying about his age.

After leaving the army, he worked as a dishwasher until an unusual audition landed him a place at acting school.

In the 2004 biography of the star, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, author Aram Goudsouzian tells the extraordinary story of how Poitier learnt to read for his first ever foray into acting.

He writes of how, in the spring of 1945, an 18-year-old Poitier knocked on the door of the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, New York. The theatre’s co-founder, Frederick O’Neal,

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Poitier, Sidney 1927-

Actor, director

At a Glance…

Thrown Out of First Audition

First Black Actor to Win Academy Award

Key Activist for Civil Rights

Selected filmography

Sources

At a 1992 banquet sponsored by the American Film Institute (AFI), a bevy of actors, filmmakers, and others gathered to pay tribute to Sidney Poitier. Superstar Denzel Washington called the veteran actor and director “a source of pride for many African Americans,” the Los Angeles Times reported, while acting luminary James Earl Jones ventured that his colleague had “played a great role in the life of our country.” Poitier himself was typically humble in the face of such praise, but he has acknowledged that his presence on film screens in the 1950s and 1960s did much to open up larger and more nuanced roles for black performers. “I was selected almost by history itself,” he averred to Susan Ellicott of the London Times.

After gracing dozens of films with his dignified, passionately intelligent presence, Poitier began to focus increasingly on di

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Sidney Poitier, Trailblazing Actor, Was Also the Celebrated Author of The Measure of a Man

A chronicle of the actor, activist, and director’s life, from growing up in poverty in the Bahamas and working menial jobs in New York. Poitier takes us on a journey through his acting career, his subsequent success, and his two marriages and relationship with fellow actor Diahann Carroll.

The Measure of a Man was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club Pick in 2007. In this “spiritual autobiography,” Poitier discusses his experience growing up on Cat Island in the Bahamas amid poverty. His mother was a great influence on him.

“I believe that my mother was a very special human being, and I think that much that has happened to me is the continuance of her soul and her spirit and her gift. All that she was, all that she could never articulate, that she could never say to people…well, she felt far more than she could speak, and she lived, and she had children, and somehow the best of her found its way beyond her, beyond the bounds of her own life. I feel that whatever is good in