CNN entertainment | Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood’s first Black movie star, dies at 94

Sidney Poitier with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in a scene from the 1967 film, “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.”

(CNN) – Sidney Poitier, whose elegant bearing and principled onscreen characters made him Hollywood’s first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, has died. He was 94.

Clint Watson, press secretary for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, confirmed to CNN that Poitier died Thursday evening.

Poitier overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas and softened his thick island accent to rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent roles for Black actors were rare. He won the Oscar for 1963’s “Lilies of the Field,” in which he played an itinerant laborer who helps a group of White nuns build a chapel.  –read more