Tony and Emmy award winning actor Cicely Tyson dead at 96

“With heavy heart, the family of Miss Cicely Tyson announces her peaceful transition this afternoon. At this time, please allow the family their privacy,” according to a statement issued through Thompson.

A onetime model, Tyson began her screen career with bit parts but gained fame in the early 1970s when Black women were finally starting to get starring roles. Besides her Oscar nomination, she won two Emmys for playing the 110-year-old former slave in the 1974 television drama The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. 

A new generation of moviegoers saw her in the 2011 hit The Help. In 2018, she was given an honorary Oscar statuette at the annual Governors Awards. “This is a culmination of all those years of haves and have-nots,” Tyson said.

LISTEN | How Cicely Tyson blazed trails in Hollywood:

Tyson’s memoir, Just As I Am, was published this week.

She told CBC Radio’s Tom Power, host of q, in an episode that aired Tuesday that she didn’t even know what a theatre was until she was in her 30s and asked to take part in a fundraiser. 

“When I walked into the theatre, I felt like I had walked into heaven,” she said. “It was so ethereal to me.” 

Tyson was one of the recipients for the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour. At that ceremony, President Barack Obama said: “Cicely’s convictions and grace have helped for us to see the dignity of every single beautiful memory of the American family.”

She told The Associated Press in 2013, “I’m very selective as I’ve been my whole career about what I do. Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of person who works only for money. It has to have some real substance for me to do it.” 

Tributes from Broadway and Hollywood poured in, including from actor Tracie Thoms who thanked her for paving the way. “A queen and a trailblazer indeed,” she wrote on Twitter.

Former co-star Marlee Matlin wrote: “She was a consummate pro and all class.” Director Kenny Leon added: “God bless the greatest and the tallest tree.”

Stardom came in her 50s

Sounder, based on the William H. Hunter novel, was the film that confirmed her stardom in 1972. Tyson was cast as the Depression-era loving wife of a sharecropper (Paul Winfield) who is confined in jail for stealing a piece of meat for his family. She is forced to care for their children and attend to the crops.

The New York Times reviewer wrote: “She passes all of her easy beauty by to give us, at long last, some sense of the profound beauty of millions of black women.” Tyson went on to earn an Academy Award nomination as best actress of 1972.

In an interview on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel, she recalled that she had been asked to test for a smaller role in the film and said she wanted to play the mother, Rebecca. She was told, “You’re too young, you’re too pretty, you’re too sexy, you’re too this, you’re too that, and I said, ‘I am an actress.”‘

In 2013, at the age of 88, Tyson won the Tony for best leading actress in a play for the revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful. It was the actor’s first time back on Broadway in three decades and she refused to turn meekly away when the teleprompter told to finish her acceptance speech.

“‘Please wrap it up,’ it says. Well, that’s exactly what you did with me: You wrapped me up in your arms after 30 years,” she told the crowd.

She told The AP afterward she had prepared no speech — “I think it’s presumptuous” — and that “I burned up half my time wondering what I was going to say.” She reprised her role in a Lifetime Television movie, which was screened at the White House.

Honorary Oscar

In 2018, she was given an honorary Oscar statuette at the annual Governors Awards. “I come from lowly status. I grew up in an area that was called the slums at the time,” Tyson said at the time. “I still cannot imagine that I have met with presidents, kings, queens. How did I get here? I marvel at it.”

Writing in Blacks in American Film and Television, Donald Bogle described Tyson as “a striking figure: slender and intense with near-perfect bone structure, magnificent smooth skin, dark penetrating eyes, and a regal air that made her seem a woman of convictions and commitment. [Audiences] sensed … her power and range.”

In the 1974 television drama The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, Tyson is seen aging from a young woman in slavery to a 110-year-old who campaigned for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

In the touching climax, she laboriously walks up to a “whites only” water fountain and takes a drink as white officers look on.

“It’s important that they see and hear history from Miss Jane’s point of view,” Tyson told The New York Times. “And I think they will be more ready to accept it from her than from someone younger”

New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael offered her praise: “She’s an actress, all right, and as tough-minded and honourable in her methods as any we’ve got.”

At the Emmy Awards, Pittman won multiple awards, including two honours for Tyson, best lead actress in a drama and best actress in a special.

“People ask me what I prefer doing — film, stage, television? I say, ‘I would have done Jane Pittman in the basement or in a storefront.’ It’s the role that determines where I go,” she told the AP.