2022 opens with a great mourning for the cinema. Sidney Poitier he died at the age of 94, a few days before his next birthday (February 20). The actor, an immigrant from the Bahamas, made the history of the seventh art when in 1964 he conquered the Oscar award per The lilies of the field. He was the first African American to win theAcademy Award and for twenty years he was also the only one (until Louis Gossett Jr. kept him company thanks to Officer and gentleman in 1983). And when he passed away, he was the oldest surviving actor to have received the award.
In 2002 he made an encore with the coveted career statuette and in 2009 the then American President Barack Obama awarded him the presidential medal of freedom.
The iconic protagonist of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, a true Hollywood legend, has alternated between a career in front of the camera and one behind the lens for a dozen films. Kind soul, believer and well-known face of the fight against racism, has had a very complicated past.
He was born on a small boat, while his mother went with her husband to the local market to sell tomatoes from their land. Son of farmers, he remains one of the most respected celebrities in the Bahamas, in fact it was Foreign Minister Fred Mitchell this morning who confirmed his death it’s at The Guardian he commented: “I had mixed feelings, in conflict between a great sadness and a sense of celebration that I felt when I learned of his passing.” The actor he was also Ambassador of the Bahamas to Japan from 1997 to 2007.
Sidney Poitier he is the father of six daughters: four born from the marriage with the first wife Juanita Hardy and two born during the second marriage with Joanna Shimkus. For theAFI (American Film Institute), Poitier is among the biggest stars of the big screen and in fact appears in twenty-second place in their ranking. AND his colleagues paid tribute to him on Twitter, starting with Jeffrey Wright who wrote: «Sidney Poitier. What an iconic actor. One of a kind. What a splendid man, elegant, affectionate and regal in a nonchalant way. RIP, sir. With love”. The message is a play on words with the title of the movie The school of violence, which in the original is precisely To sir, with love.
The same reference is also used by Whoopi Goldberg who adds: «He showed us how to aim for the stars». Joseph Gordon-Levitt greeted him calling him “one of the greats” while Rosanna Arquette remembers him as a “beautiful human being and actor”. Sidney Poitier he also wrote two memoirs, the most famous of which remains This Life, a window on his private. He retired in 2001, the year Denzel Washington won his Oscar and mentioned him in his thanks, as well as having declared to Variety these days that one of his great regrets is not having been able to share the set with him.
Poitier, in fact, has always been considered a pillar of the African American community, a civil rights activist especially in a delicate era like the 1950s and 1960s, was an engine of change and an exemplary witness to how art can trigger a real revolution.
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