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(Trends Wide) –– Oscar-winning actor and civil rights activist Sidney Poitier has died at 94, Clint Watson, press secretary to the Bahamas prime minister, confirmed to Trends Wide.
Poitier died late Thursday, Watson said, citing direct family members in the Bahamas.
Watson said the country’s Prime Minister Philip Davis will hold a press conference later today.
Poitier was the first black American to win the Oscar for best actor in 1964, for his role in Lilies of The Field, and the second to win an Academy Award. Hattie McDaniel was the first to win the Best Supporting Actress award for gone With the Wind.
Five years earlier, in 1959, he had also established himself as the first black American to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor for the film. The Defiant Ones.
Poitier debuted in 1950 with No Way Out, and his film career includes roles in In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Y To Sir, with Love.
In 2001, he won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Album for “The Measure Of A Man.” And a year later he won an honorary Academy Award “in recognition of his remarkable achievements as an artist and as a human being.”
Then, in 2009, then-President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Sidney Poitier’s life beyond cinema
Sidney Poitier grew up on Cat Island in the Bahamas. The family later moved to Nassau, but his parents sent him to live with relatives in Miami at age 14. After an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan, he left Miami at 16 and moved to New York.
After lying about his age, he joined the Army at 16. He pretended to be insane in order to get discharged after nine months, and later admitted to deception in his book “The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography.”
A heavy Bahamian accent and limited reading ability cost him an acting job at the American Negro Theater in Harlem. He overcame his accent by imitating radio announcers and improved his reading skills by studying newspapers.
He has dual citizenship in the United States and the Bahamas.
In fact, Poitier was the Bahamian ambassador to Japan between 1997 and 2007.
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