As the first Black man to win an Oscar, Sidney Poitier’s six-decade career has been credited with paving the way for so many other Black actors.
Following his death on January 6 at 94, tributes poured in for the icon, including former President Barack Obama, who said Sidney was “a singular talent who epitomized dignity and grace.”
Fellow actor Denzel Washington said it was a privilege to Sidney, a friend adding: “He was a gentle man and opened doors for all of us that had been closed for years.”
After securing his first lead role in the movie Blackboard Jungle in 1955, Sidney Poitier went on to star in 55 films and TV series and will go down in history for breaking down Hollywood’s racial barriers.
As the saying goes ‘No man succeeds without a good woman behind him’ this was the case with the Bahamian-American actor who married Canadian actress Joanna Shimkus in 1976.
But by the time he met Shimkus he’d already been married, had four children, and had an affair.
Poitier was the youngest of seven children who spent the first ten years of his life on Cat Island in the Bahamas where his father had a farm. The family would travel to Miami to sell products which is where Poitier was unexpectedly born three months premature – which meant he was entitled to U.S. citizenship.
After moving to the Bahamas’ capital Nassau he then 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 audition landed him a role with the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, New York. It was the budding actor’s second attempt to get in after he was told he “could hardly read” and couldn’t be an actor with the accent he had after his first audition when he was 18 years old.
Undeterred by the harsh rejection he went away and bought himself a radio so he could mimic the accents he heard, read any newspaper and magazine he could get his hands on, and enlisted the help of an elderly Jewish waiter at the restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher to help him read and expand his vocabulary.
He returned to the production company a year and a half later where he had another audition which secured him a place on the program and a career that would win him countless awards.
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