Died Sidney Poitier, was the first African American actor to win the Oscar for Best Lead Actor. He was 94. Unforgettable protagonist of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? where the love of the daughter of a progressive couple (Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) with a black doctor was told and about many other films that have paved the way for success in Hollywood for African American actors and actresses.
One of the biggest stars of American cinema, he won the Academy Award in 1964 for interpreting it The lilies of the field, thanks to which he also won the Golden Globe, before him only Hattie McDaniel, the Mami of Gone With the Wind. He remained the only black actor with the statuette until Louis Gossett Jr., which he won in 1983 for the film Officer and gentleman for Best Supporting Actor. In his long career, which began in the late 1940s, he won two Oscars (the other for a lifetime achievement in 2002), ten Golden Globes and six Bafta. In 1974 he was appointed Sir and in 2009 Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Born in Miami on February 20, 1927 to modest Bahamian traders, with his family he moved first to his native Bahamas and then back to Miami, but it was in New York that he discovered his passion for acting after an adolescence on the edge of legality and ‘experience in the military, he worked as a cleaner at the American Negro Theater exchanging his salary for acting lessons. The debut was through the theater and then he got small parts on television, while his first film role was that of a problematic high school student in the film. The seed of violence (1955). The first Oscar nomination came early, in 1959 with The mud wall where he played with Tony Curtis a prisoner in chains who flee after an accident, a film that denounced the racism still prevailing in the United States and won nine nominations and two statuettes. In the same year he then demonstrated that he knew how to sing and dance in Gershwin’s musical Porgy & Bess con Dorothy Dandridge.
The sixties were the decade that saw the actor shine with the statuette for the film by Ralph Nelson which told the meeting between a wandering worker and a group of German nuns who decide he was sent by God to build a church. His voice, which made the gospel famous all over the world, also contributed to the Oscar performance Amen. Only in 1967 were three very different films released: the detective Inspector Tibbs’ hot night di Norman Jewison, The school of violence by James Clavell, in which he played a professor at a problematic school in London and the cult starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn that garnered ten nominations and two Oscars.
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