Benztown Produces Audio Tribute for Sidney Poitier

RADIO ONLINE | Friday, January 7, 2022

Sidney Poitier Tribute

Benztown has issued an audio tribute to Sidney Poitier, the trailblazing Oscar-winning actor, director, ambassador and activist, who has died at age 94. years old. Hear the tribute here. Poitier, the first Black man to win an Academy Award, paved the way for Black actors in film and brought a quiet dignity and resolve to his characters on screen.

Poitier earned his Best Actor Oscar in 1964 for his role in "Lilies of the Field." He was also lauded for his portrayal of a Black doctor engaged to a white woman in 1967's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," starring opposite Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Also in 1967, he played Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs in the Southern crime drama "In the Heat of the Night." It was a character he would reprise in two sequels. Poitier also memorably played an inner-city teacher in "To Sir, with Love," his third film in 1967.

Born in Miami, FL, on February 20, 1927, while his Bahamian parents were visiting the U.S., Poitier spent most of his childhood in the Bahamas. As a teen, he was sent to live with one of his brothers in Miami, and at age 16, moved on his own to New York City. After working a series of menial jobs and serving in the U.S. Army, he landed a spot at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem. Poitier made his film debut in 1950 in "No Way Out," playing a doctor treating a white bigot.

His breakthrough role came in 1955 playing a student in an inner-city school in "Blackboard Jungle." He earned his first Academy Award nomination for his starring in the 1958 crime drama "The Defiant Ones" with Tony Curtis. Other memorable roles included the musical "Porgy and Bess," the film adaptation of "A Raisin in the Sun" and "A Patch of Blue."

Beginning in the 1970s, Poitier directed a number of films, including "Uptown Saturday Night" and "Let's Do It Again" with Bill Cosby, and in directed the hit comedy "Stir Crazy," starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, in 1980. Poitier retired from acting in 1997, and went on to serve as the non-resident Bahamian ambassador to Japan until 2007.

In 2002, 38 years after receiving his best actor Oscar, Poitier was given an honorary Academy Award for his "remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being." In 2009, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor. Poitier is survived by his wife, Joanna Shimkus, and six daughters.