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Sidney Poitier

File:Sidney_Poitier_1968.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Sidney Poitier

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Also known as Sir Sidney Poitier, Sidney L. Poitier

Bahamian and American actor and diplomat (1927–2022)

OverviewAI-generated

Sidney Poitier (1927–2022) was an American and Bahamian film actor, director, diplomat, and autobiographer. Born in Miami, Florida, he began his professional career in 1943. Poitier served in the United States Army during World War II. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and held citizenship in both the United States and The Bahamas.

His awards include the Academy Award for Best Actor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and the Henrietta Award. He received nominations for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play and multiple Golden Globe Awards. Poitier was married to Joanna Shimkus and had a child named Sydney Tamiia Poitier. He spoke English and identified as a deist.

Synthesized by Vinony from 44 facts across 9 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, TMDb, Wikiquote, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born
1927
Works
17

Top works

  • The measure of a man
  • This Life
  • Life Beyond Measure
  • This Life
  • Sidney Poitier

via Open Library + Wikidata

Film & TV

Acting · Miami, Florida, USA

Sidney Poitier KBE (February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian and American actor, film director, and diplomat. In 1964, he became the first black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, for Lilies of the Field. Other accolades include two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a competitive British Academy of Film and Television Arts award (BAFTA), and a Grammy Award…

Known for

  • The Resurrection of Christ2026
  • Hollywood Black — Self (archive footage)2024
  • Sidney Poitier - The Man Who Changed Hollywood — Self (archive footage)2023
  • Reinventing Elvis: The 68' Comeback — Self (archive footage)2023
  • Sidney — Self2022
  • A Star Without a Star: The Untold Juanita Moore Story — Self2022
  • Poitier's Walter Lee — Self (archive footage)2018
  • Mr. SOUL! — Self (archive footage)2018
  • Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart — Self2017
  • The Madding Crowd — Self (archive footage)2017

via TMDB

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Male
Origin
United States
Active from
1927
Active to
2022

Discography

Discogs

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
510
Total plays
2,978

Similar artists

Jules de CorteMaarten van RoozendaalAubrey DebaucheryFats Waller & His RhythmAlison Krauss & Gillian Welch

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Sidney+Poitier">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Sidney Poitier

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

  1. Geneious Basic: An integrated and extendable desktop software platform for the organization and analysis of sequence data

    · 2012 · cited 17,970x

  2. Harmonizing the Metabolic Syndrome

    · 2009 · cited 12,621x

  3. Studies of Illness in the Aged

    · 1963 · cited 9,727x

  4. Diagnosis and Management of the Metabolic Syndrome

    · 2005 · cited 9,438x

  5. Voice and Equality

    · 1995 · cited 6,514x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

  • “The older we get the less afraid we are.”
  • “I would like to grow less afraid of dying. I am infinitely less afraid today than I was 15 or 25 years ago. I was most afraid of dying when I was 33, because I come from a Catholic family.”
  • “If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things—you feel that after death, you will be no more.”
  • “The great disease of mankind is ignorance. With knowledge you can grasp tight a belief: that you can be better, that the world can be better. With that, you can claim hope. Hope is the eternal tool in the survival kit for mankind. We hope for a little luck, we hope for a better tomorrow, we hope — although it is an impossible hope — to somehow get out of this world alive. And if we can't and don't, then it is enough to rejoice in our short time here and to remember how much we loved the view.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~28 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Sidney Poitier (/ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ PWAH-tyay; February 20, 1927 – January 6, 2022) was a Bahamian-American actor, film director, activist, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Among his other accolades are two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award and a Grammy Award, in addition to nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. In 1999, he was ranked number 22 among the "American Film Institute's 100 Stars". Poitier was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Poitier's family lived in the Bahamas, then still a Crown colony, but he was born in Miami, Florida, while they were visiting, which granted him U.S. citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved back to Miami at age 15, and to New York City when he was 16. He joined the American Negro Theatre, gaining his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle (1955). Poitier gained fame for his leading roles in films such as The Defiant Ones (1958), for which he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor and became the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. In 1964, he won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Sidney Poitier” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (8)

Available in 92 languages

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via Wikidata sitelinks · CC0