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Sidney Poitier, the first black actor to win an Oscar, died at 94 on January 7.
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Director Peter Bogdanovich died on January 6 in Los Angeles.
He was 82 years old.
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Kim Mi-soo, a South Korean actress who appeared on the Disney + series "Snowdrop" and Netflix's "Hellbound," died at age 29 on January 5.
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French TV star Igor Bogdanoff died of COVID-19 on January 4, six days after his twin brother Grichka passed away from the same cause.
(CNN) ––
Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and civil rights activist, has died at the age of 94, Clint Watson, press secretary to the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, confirmed to CNN.
Poitier died late Thursday, Watson said, citing direct family members in the Bahamas.
Watson said the country's Prime Minister Philip Davis will hold a press conference later today.
Poitier was the first black American to win the Oscar for best actor in 1964, for his role in
Lilies of The Field
, and the second to win an Academy Award.
Hattie McDaniel was the first to win Best Supporting Actress for
Gone with the Wind
.
Five years earlier, in 1959, he had also established himself as the first black American to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor for the film
The Defiant Ones
.
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Poitier made his debut in 1950 with
No Way Out,
and his film career includes roles in
In the Heat of the Night,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, and
To Sir, with Love.
In 2001, he won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Album for "The Measure Of A Man."
And a year later he won an honorary Academy Award "in recognition of his remarkable achievements as an artist and as a human being."
Then, in 2009, then-President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Sidney Poitier's life beyond cinema
Sidney Poitier grew up on Cat Island in the Bahamas.
The family later moved to Nassau, but his parents sent him to live with relatives in Miami at age 14.
After an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan, he left Miami at 16 and moved to New York.
After lying about his age, he joined the Army at 16.
He pretended he was suffering from insanity to get discharged after nine months, and later admitted to deception in his book "The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography."
A heavy Bahamian accent and limited reading ability cost him an acting job at the American Negro Theater in Harlem.
He overcame his accent by imitating radio announcers and improved his reading skills by studying newspapers.
He has dual citizenship in the United States and the Bahamas.
In fact, Poitier was the Bahamian ambassador to Japan between 1997 and 2007.
Sidney Poitier