Sidney Poitier dies, he was the first African American actor to win an Academy Award

He died Sidney PoitiersHe was the first African American actor to win an Oscar for Best Leading Actor. He was 94 years old. The protagonist is unforgettable Guess who’s coming to dinner? Where he narrated the love of the daughter of a progressive couple (Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) with a black doctor, and about several other films that paved the way for success in Hollywood for African American actors and actresses.

One of the biggest stars of American cinema, he won the Academy Award in 1964 for his interpretation of it field lilies, thanks to which he also won a Golden Globe, before him only Hattie McDaniel, Mami Gone with the Wind. He remained the only black actor to own the statuette until Louis Gossett Jr., who won it in 1983 for the movie An officer and a gentleman Best Supporting Actor. In his long career, which began in the late 1940s, he won two Academy Awards (the other for his life achievement in 2002), ten Golden Globes and six BAFTAs. In 1974 he was appointed Sir and in 2009 Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Born in Miami on February 20, 1927 to modest merchants from the Bahamas, he moved with his family first to his native Bahamas and then returned to Miami, but in New York he discovered his passion for acting after a teenage period on the brink of legality and “experience in the military, working as a cleaner in a theater The American Negro traded his salary for acting lessons.He debuted through theater and then got small parts on television, while his first film role was that of a high school student in the movie. the seed of violence (1955). The first Academy Award nomination came early, in 1959 with mud wall Where he played Tony Curtis, a chained prisoner who escapes after an accident, a film that denounced the racism still prevalent in the United States and won nine nominations and two statuettes. In the same year, he then showed that he knows how to sing and dance in Gershwin’s musicals Porgy and Bass Con Dorothy Dandridge.

The 1960s was the decade that saw the actor star in the figurine of the film Ralph Nelson telling the meeting between a itinerant worker and a group of German nuns who they decided had been sent by God to build a church. His voice, which made the gospel famous all over the world, also contributed to the presentation of the Academy Award Trustworthy.