A natural film star who quietly pioneered a revolution Sidney Poitier

For postwar America, Sidney Poitier became something like the Black Cary Grant: a strikingly handsome and well-spoken Bahamian-American actor. He was a natural film star who projected passion, yet tempered by a kind of refinement and restraint that white moviegoers found reassuring.

- Peter Bradshaw

Poitier, who died last week aged 94, was graceful, manly, self-possessed, with an innate dignity and a tremendous screen presence. He also had a beautiful, melodious voice – the result of his childhood spent in the Bahamas, and then struggling early years in New York, trying to make it as an actor and privately studying the voices of mellifluous white radio announcers. He was a traditional, classical actor in many ways, following in the footsteps of Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, but eminently castable in a new generation of modern roles.

Almost all his famous movie roles are defined by race and racial difference, particularly that extraordinary trio of movies that came out in one year, 1967. In To Sir With Love, he was the teacher in swinging London who gets through to the kids by challenging them to be adults. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner he is the man who wants to marry a young white woman, in an America where this was still illegal in many southern states. And in In the Heat of the Night he was the homicide detective forced to assist a bigoted white cop, played by Rod Steiger.