Legendary Hollywood actor Sidney Poitier the first Black winner of the best actor Oscar for his role in Lilies of the Field has died at age 94.Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, confirmed Poitier’s death.In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he played a Black man with a white fiancee and In the Heat of the Night, he was Virgil Tibbs, a Black police officer confronting racism during a murder investigation. He also played a teacher in a tough London school that year in To Sir, With Love. Poitier had won his history-making best actor Oscar for Lilies of the Field in 1963, playing a handyman who helps German nuns build a chapel in the desert.
Five years before that Poitier had been the first Black man nominated for a lead actor Oscar for his role in The Defiant Ones.His Tibbs character from In the Heat of the Night was immortalized in two sequels – They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in 1970 and The Organization in 1971 – and became the basis of the television series In the Heat of the Night starring Carroll O’Connor and Howard Rollins. His other classic films of that era included “A Patch of Blue” in 1965 in which his character ias befriended by a blind white girl, “The Blackboard Jungle” and “A Raisin in the Sun,” which Poitier also performed on Broadway.In 2002, Poitier was chosen to receive an Academy Honorary Award, in recognition of his "remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being. Upon the death of Kirk Douglas in 2020, Poitier became one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, and the oldest living and earliest surviving male Academy Award winner. From 1997 to 2007, Poitier served as Bahamian Ambassador to Japan