Sidney Poitier Vs. Plato by Tomorrow Pictures published on 2022-01-08T18:16:18Z Sidney L. Poitier was a Bahamian-American actor, film director and ambassador. In 1964, he was the first black person and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. 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," in which he played an itinerant laborer who helps a group of White nuns build a chapel. Many of his best-known films explored racial tensions as Americans were grappling with social changes wrought by the civil rights movement. In 1967 alone, 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." Genre Storytelling