Sidney Poitier Sidney Poitier, born in 1927, American motion-picture actor, the first black to become a major Hollywood star.

Sidney Poitier Sidney Poitier, born in 1927, American motion-picture actor, the first black to become a major Hollywood star. Born in Miami, Florida, Poitier began acting with the American Negro Theater and made his movie debut in 1950 with a featured role in No Way Out, one of Hollywood's first films on racial bigotry. His next important credit was Blackboard Jungle (1955). The Defiant Ones (1958) brought Poitier an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of an escaped convict. He was influential in getting the prize-winning Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun, in which he starred, produced on stage (1959) and on screen (1961). Poitier won an Oscar five years later for Lilies of the Field (1963), in which he played a drifter who becomes a reluctant mainstay to a group of émigré nuns. Poitier was hailed as the box-office star of 1967 for his charismatic work on three popular films: In the Heat of the Night; To Sir, with Love; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He did not appear in any movies from 1976 to 1987, preferring to direct (Buck and the Preacher, 1972; Uptown Saturday Night, 1974, and its sequel Let's Do It Again, 1975; and Stir Crazy, 1980). He played civil-rights lawyer and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall in the 1991 Emmy Award-winning television miniseries Separate but Equal. (Marshall was the lawyer who successfully argued in Brown v. Board of Education that the Separate but Equal doctrine was unconstitutional.) Poitier played a gunfighter in the CBS miniseries Children of the Dust (1995) and was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Nelson Mandela in the made-fortelevision film Mandela and de Klerk (1997). He also had small roles in the film thrillers Little Nikita (1988) and Sneakers (1992), before a major success with the television movie To Sir, with Love 2 (1996). Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, To Sir, with Love 2 was virtually a remake of the 1967 film, but transferred from England to the United States. Poitier then starred in The Jackal (1997) as the FBI director tracking down an assassin played by Bruce Willis. Poitier published his autobiography My Life in 1980 and a follow-up, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, in 2000. In 1992 he was presented with the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award and a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement in the performing arts. In 2002 he received an honorary Academy Award for his contribution to cinema. Contributed By: Richard T. Jameson Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.