Actress lit up the screen portraying resilient Black women
Cicely Tyson, an actress whose electrifying portrayals of resilient Black women — foremost in the 1974 TV movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman but also as Coretta Scott King and Harriet Tubman — brought some of the first ennobling portrayals of African-Americans to a vast television audience, died Thursday. She was 96.
Tyson had shrouded her age until late in life. For much of her career, she convincingly presented herself as 15 years younger than she was, and she continued to appear onscreen and in Broadway roles past what was her 90th birthday.
Her family announced the death in a statement shared by her manager, Larry Thompson, providing no further details.
Regal in bearing, with willowy beauty and delicately
chiselled features, Tyson was known for embodying women of great poise striving under great pressure.
Her life had been strewn with obstacles and marked by periods of tumult: a childhood of desperate poverty, a deeply religious mother who considered her daughter's career choice “sinful,” and a tempestuous, much-examined celebrity marriage to jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in the 1980s.
Also looming over her career were the persistent limitations in an entertainment industry that cast Black women in demeaning roles as prostitutes, drug addicts and housemaids.
Tyson said she refused many such roles offered to her, vowing to accept only parts of “strength, pride and dignity.” Because of her uncompromising selectivity, she was out of work for months and sometimes years at a stretch, even after her breakthrough, Oscar-nominated performance as a sharecropper's wife in Sounder (1972), a drama set in the Depression-era South.
“I wait for roles — first, to be written for a woman, then, to be written for a Black woman,” she told the Entertainment News Service in 1997. “And then I have the audacity to be selective about the kinds of roles I play. I've really got three strikes against me. So, aren't you amazed I'm still here?”
Tyson also brought layered emotional intensity to fictional characters such as the centenarian Jane Pittman, a role for which she won two Emmy Awards, and the mother of rebellious enslaved person Kunta Kinte in the ABC blockbuster miniseries Roots (1977), based on Alex Haley's historical saga.
Her third and final Emmy was for a supporting role as a strong-willed housekeeper of a Civil War veteran in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994), a CBS-TV movie based on Allan Gurganus's bestselling novel.
At 89, she capped her career with a Tony Award for her performance as a spirited widow in The Trip to Bountiful, a 2013 Broadway revival of the Horton Foote drama.