Sidney Poitier, whose elegant bearing and principled onscreen characters made him Hollywood’s first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, has died. He was 94. Clint Watson, press secretary for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, confirmed to CNN that Poitier died Thursday evening. 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.

As Americans grappled with the societal upheavals produced by the civil rights movement, several of his best-known films examined racial tensions. In 1967 alone, he played a Philadelphia cop facing discrimination in small-town Mississippi in “In the Heat of the Night” and a doctor in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” who wins over his White fiancée’s suspicious parents.