Sidney L. Poitier KBE is a Bahamian-American retired actor, film director, activist, and ambassador. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first black male and Bahamian actor to win the award. Upon the death of Kirk Douglas in 2020, Poitier became one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, and the oldest living and earliest surviving Best Actor Oscar-winner. From 1997 to 2007, Poitier served as Bahamian Ambassador to Japan.
His entire family lived in the Bahamas, then still a British colony, but Poitier was born unexpectedly in Miami while they were visiting for the weekend, which automatically granted him American citizenship. He grew up in the Bahamas, but moved back to Miami aged 15, and to New York when he was 16. He joined the North American Negro Theatre, landing his breakthrough film role as a high school student in the film Blackboard Jungle.
In 1958, Poitier starred with Tony Curtis as chained-together escaped convicts in The Defiant Ones, which received nine Academy Award nominations.