Which international diplomatic role did the actor Sidney Portier hold from 1997 to 2007?

Sidney Poitier (born 1927) holds dual citizenship as a Bahamian-American. He has had an illustrious career as an actor, film director, activist, and ambassador. His family lived in the Bahamas, then still a British colony, but he was born unexpectedly in Miami, Florida while his family was visiting for a weekend. This birth event automatically granted him U.S. citizenship.

In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role in the film ‘Lilies of the Field’ playing a handyman helping a group of German-speaking nuns build a chapel. He became the first black male and Bahamian actor to win the award.

In 2002, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and two years later, Poitier was chosen to receive an Academy Honorary Award, in recognition of his “remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being.”

In 2009, Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United Sates’ highest civilian honor.

He served as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2007. Concurrently he was the ambassador for the Bahamas to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a specialized agency aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, the arts, the sciences, and culture.

An ambassador is an official envoy, who represents his or her own government for a diplomatic assignment to another country.