Legendary actor Sidney Poitier dies at 94

Legendary Hollywood actor Sir Sidney Poitier has died at the age of 94.

Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed Poitier's death.

In 1964, he made history by becoming the first Black man to win an Oscar for best actor for his work in "Lilies of the Field", and went on to appear in dozens of films and television shows.

The cause of his death has not yet been announced.

Poitier created a distinguished film legacy in a single year with three 1967 films at a time when segregation prevailed in much of the United States.

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 was born in Miami on February 20, 1927, and raised on a tomato farm in the Bahamas, and had just one year of formal schooling.

He struggled against poverty, illiteracy and prejudice to become one of the first Black actors to be known and accepted in major roles by mainstream audiences.

Poitier picked his roles with care, burying the old Hollywood idea that Black actors could appear only in demeaning contexts as shoeshine boys, train conductors and maids.

"I love you, I respect you, I imitate you," Denzel Washington, another Oscar winner, once told Poitier at a public ceremony.

As a director, Poitier worked with his friend Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby in "Uptown Saturday Night" in 1974 and Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in 1980's "Stir Crazy."

STARTED ON STAGE

Poitier grew up in the small Bahamian village of Cat Island and in Nassau before he moved to New York at 16, lying about his age to sign up for a short stint in the Army and then working at odd jobs, including dishwasher, while taking acting lessons.

The young actor got his first break when he met the casting director of the American Negro Theater. He was an understudy in "Days of Our Youth" and took over when the star, Belafonte, who also would become a pioneering Black actor, fell ill.

Poitier went on to success on Broadway in "Anna Lucasta" in 1948 and, two years later, got his first movie role in "No Way Out" with Richard Widmark.

In all, he acted in more than 50 films and directed nine, starting in 1972 with "Buck and the Preacher" in which he co-starred with Belafonte.

In 1992, Poitier was given the Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute, the most prestigious honour after the Oscar, joining recipients such as Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, James Cagney and Orson Welles.

In 2002, an honorary Oscar recognized "his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being."