Sidney Poitier, What A Legend And A Great Hollywood Icon

Sidney Poitier, the groundbreaking actor and a inspirational acto who transformed how Black people were portrayed on screen, and the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for best lead performance and also the first to be a top box-office draw, has died. He was 94. Poitier overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas and softened his thick island accent to rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent roles for Black actors were rare. He won the Oscar for 1963's "Lilies of the Field." Many of his best-known films explored racial tensions as Americans were grappling with social changes wrought by the civil rights movement. In 1967, he appeared as a Philadelphia detective fighting bigotry in small-town Mississippi in "In the Heat of the Night" and a doctor who wins over his White fiancée's skeptical parents in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." The youngest of seven children, Sidney Poitier was born several months premature in Miami on February 20, 1927, so tiny he could fit in his father's hand. His parents were tomato farmers who often traveled to and from Florida and the Bahamas. He was not expected to live. His mother consulted a palm reader, "The lady took her hand and started speaking to my mother: 'Don't worry about your son. He will survive,'"  When he was 15, his parents sent him from the Bahamas to live with an older brother in Miami, as they figured he'll have more opportunities. Poitier didn't like Miami and soon headed north to New York were he tried his hand at acting which did not go well at first. As he had trouble reading scripts. He got a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant and an elderly waiter took an interest to the teen and spent nights after work helping him to improve his comprehension, grammar and punctuation. Poitier made a conscious decision to reject roles that weren't consistent with his values or that reflected badly upon his race. May he RIP. Read more click on link: https://cnn.it/3qdRxfW