37°
Bahamian Prime Minister Phillip Davis made the announcement that Poitier died on Thursday, Jan. 8 at the age of 94.
A native of Cat Island in the Bahamas, Davis said: "The whole Bahamas grieves the celebrated life of a great Bahamian."
Poitier, who grew up on a tomato farm and taught himself to read and write, became a resident of Westchester County, moving to Mount Vernon in 1956.
He won the Oscar for "Lilies of the Field," in 1963, in which he played a migrant worker who helps a group of White nuns build a chapel.
Many of his best-known roles focused on racial tensions at the same Americans were fighting for social change in the 1960s.
In 1967 he appeared in several movies starring 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 parents in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."
As the lone Black leading man at the time, Poitier said he came under scrutiny for everything he did.
"It's been an enormous responsibility," Poitier told Oprah Winfrey in 2000, reported CNN. "And I accepted it, and I lived in a way that showed how I respected that responsibility. I had to. In order for others to come behind me, there were certain things I had to do."
To become that leading man, Poitier struggled for years working menial jobs after his parents put him on a boat for Miami when he was 14-years-old to live with his older brother.
But unsettled in Miami, he moved to New York and worked kitchen jobs as he tried his hand at acting, listening to radio shows to develop his language, and having a friend read him the newspaper so he could learn to read scripts.
His first chance at a significant role came when he landed work with the American Negro Theatre, where he took acting lessons and landed a stage role as an understudy to actor Harry Belafonte.
That role led to additional roles on Broadway, which eventually caught the eye of Hollywood producers.
Poitier's first movie was in the 1950's "No Way Out," in which he played a young doctor who was required to treat a racist patient.
He is survived by two daughters.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Yonkers and receive free news updates.
