Sidney Poitier, first Black actor to win best actor Academy Award, dies at 94

Sidney Poitier, who broke through racial barriers as the first Black winner of the best actor Oscar for his role in "Lilies of the Field," and inspired a generation during the civil rights movement, has died at age 94, an official from the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday.

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

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 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.