Cicely Tyson was a stage, screen and television actress whose vivid portrayals of strong African-American women shattered racial stereotypes in the dramatic arts of the 1970s, propelling her to stardom and fame as an exemplar for civil rights. In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned black people. Cicely Tyson won two Emmys for her performance in the 1974 civil rights-era film The Autobiography of Miss Jane P... moreCicely Tyson was a stage, screen and television actress whose vivid portrayals of strong African-American women shattered racial stereotypes in the dramatic arts of the 1970s, propelling her to stardom and fame as an exemplar for civil rights. In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned black people. Cicely Tyson won two Emmys for her performance in the 1974 civil rights-era film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. She also became the first black woman to take on a main role in the TV drama East Side/West Side in the 1960s. Tyson was nominated for a best actress Oscar and Golden Globe in 1973 for Sounder, about a family of poor black sharecroppers in the midst of the Great Depression in 1933 Louisiana.
In a remarkable career of many decades, her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.” At 93, she won an honorary Oscar, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020.
Cicely Tyson was born in East Harlem, the youngest of three children of William and Theodosia (also known as Frederica) Tyson, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father was a carpenter and painter, and her mother was a domestic worker. Her parents separated when she was 10, and the children were raised by a strict Christian mother who did not permit movies or dates. At 10, Cicely sold shopping bags on the streets of East Harlem. After graduating from Charles Evans Hughes High School, she found work as a secretary at the Red Cross, and later Cicely became a model at the advice of friends, appearing in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and elsewhere. In the 1940s, she studied at the Actors Studio. Her first role was on NBC’s “Frontiers of Faith” in 1951. Her disapproving mother kicked her out. By 1957, she was acting in off-Broadway productions and went on to gain small roles in feature films before she was cast as Portia in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968.
Tyson’s monumental catalog of work spanned six decades. Ms. Tyson played Stephanie Virtue, a prostitute, for two years, and won a Vernon Rice Award in 1962, igniting her career. In Cicely Tyson’s ground-breaking role in the 1974 television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—for which she won two Emmys (Actress of the Year and Best Lead Actress in a Drama)—she played a woman who was born into slavery and lived to participate in the civil rights movement in 1962 at the age of 110. Her work on the small screen covers the TV era in full, from 1960s shows such as Naked City and Guiding Light through House of Cards and beyond; she was also nominated for an Emmy for portraying Binta, Kunta Kinte’s mother, in the epochal 1977 miniseries Roots. And on the big screen, Tyson starred in more than two dozen films, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968); Sounder (1972), for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar; Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), in which she played the story’s secret heroine, Sipsey; several of Tyler Perry’s blockbuster comedies; and the 2011 megahit The Help, in which Tyson co-starred with Viola Davis—on whose epic TV series, How to Get Away With Murder. She also appeared as Coretta Scott King in the 1978 NBC mini-series “King,” about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final years; as Harriet Tubman, whose Underground Railroad spirited slaves to freedom, in “A Woman Called Moses” (1978); and as a Chicago teacher devoted to poor children in “The Marva Collins Story” (1981). In 1994, she won a supporting actress Emmy for her portrayal of Castalia in the mini-series Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. She appeared in Broadway plays, television episodes and minor movie roles, including “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” (1962) and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” (1969). In “The Corn Is Green” (1983), an Emlyn Williams play set in Wales, Ms. Tyson received mixed reviews as Miss Moffat, an English schoolteacher in a coal-mining town who awakens the minds of impoverished youngsters. After a three-decade absence from Broadway, Ms. Tyson returned in 2013 in a production of “The Trip to Bountiful,” playing Carrie Watts, an old woman, also conceived as a white character, who yearns to see her hometown before dying. Her performance won the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. Her later television roles included that of Ophelia Harkness in a half dozen episodes of the long-running ABC legal drama “How to Get Away With Murder,” for which she was nominated repeatedly for Emmys and other awards for outstanding guest or supporting actress (2015-19), and in the role of Doris Jones in three episodes of “House of Cards” (2016).
Tyson's memoir Just As I Am, written with Michelle Burford, was published in January 2021, days before her death, tells about her life story and her iconic roles. Tyson's book talked about her having a baby girl called Joan at 17, and raised her largely out of the spotlight. She also had an early marriage to Kenneth Franklin which was later dissolved. Tyson was also godmother to the singer Lenny Kravitz, having been friends with his mother, as well as to Denzel Washington's daughter Katia and actor, director, producer and writer Tyler Perry's son Aman. She was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a runner, a meditator and, from 1981 to 1989, the wife of the jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis.
Cecily Tyson will be remembered for inspiring Black-American women to embrace their own standards of beauty — including helping to popularize the Afro. She was always reticent about her age, charity work and other personal details, like being a good-will ambassador for UNICEF in 1985-86. She helped found the Dance Theater of Harlem after the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. In 1994, an East Harlem building where she lived as a child was named for her; it and three others were rehabilitated for 58 poor families. In 1995, a magnet school she supported in East Orange, N.J., was renamed the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. And in November 2018, a month before she turned 94, Ms. Tyson received an honorary Oscar, a Governors Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In an emotional acceptance speech in Los Angeles, Ms. Tyson, whose highest accolade from the film industry had been her Oscar nomination in 1972, paid tribute to her mother, who had opposed her plan for a career as an entertainer.
