Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier (; born February 20, 1927) is a Bahamian-American actor and film director. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor, the first black actor to win that award, and was nominated a second time. In addition, he was nominated six times for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award (BAFTA) for Best Foreign Actor, winning each once. From 1997 to 2007, he served as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. His family lived in the Bahamas, but Poitier was born in Miami while they were visiting, thereby acquiring American citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, moving to New York when he was 16. He joined the North American Negro Theatre, landing his breakthrough film role as an incorrigible high school student in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle. In 1958, Poitier starred with Tony Curtis in the critically acclaimed The Defiant Ones as chained-together convicts who escape and must cooperate. Each received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, with Poitier's being the first for a black actor, as well as nominations for the BAFTAs, which Poitier won. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field (1963) in which he played a handyman who stays with and helps a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel. Poitier also received critical acclaim for A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and A Patch of Blue (1965).

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