Sidney Poitier is a Bahamian-American actor, film director, and ambassador. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is the oldest living and earliest surviving Best Actor Academy Award winner. In 2009 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
About Sidney Poitier in brief
Sidney Poitier is a Bahamian-American actor, film director, and ambassador. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is the oldest living and earliest surviving Best Actor Academy Award winner. He was born unexpectedly in Miami while his parents were visiting. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved back to Miami aged 15 and 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. He directed the hit Stir Crazy starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, among other films. He returned to acting in the late 1980s and early 1990s in a few thrillers and television roles. In 2009 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him 22nd on their list of Greatest Male Stars of classic Hollywood cinema. In 2002, he was chosen to receive an Academy Honorary Award, in recognition of his “remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being.” He was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. He has been awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding lifetime achievement in film, in 2016, for his work in Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again, A Piece of the Action, and Stir Crazy.
He also received the Golden Globe Award for Lilies of the Field, in which he played a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel. He received Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for the latter film, but not for the Oscars, likely due to vote splitting between his roles. He lived with his family on Cat Island until he was 10, when they moved to Nassau, where he was exposed to modern electricity. In 1834, his wife’s estate had 86 slaves, who kept the name ‘Poitier,’ a name that had been introduced into the Anglosphere since the 11th century since Norman Norman Norman conquest in 11th century. His uncle believed that the Poititier ancestors on his father’s side had migrated from Haiti, and were probably among the runaway slaves who established maroon communities throughout the Bahamas. However, there had been no white Poiers from the Bahamas; the name came from a white man who had immigrated from Jamaica in the early 1800s. He died in a car crash in 2009. He had a son, Michael, who was born in 2010 and is the son of Michael Caine, the former Prime Minister of Bahamas.
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This page is based on the article Sidney Poitier published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
