Cicely Tyson, pioneering actor, dies at 96
Cicely Tyson, the pioneering Black actor who gained a 1972 Oscar nomination for her role as the sharecropper’s wife in “Sounder,” a Tony Award in 2013 at age 88, and touched TV viewers’ hearts in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” died Thursday at age 96.
A onetime model, she began her screen career with bit parts but gained fame in the early 1970s when Black women were finally starting to get starring roles. Tyson refused to take parts simply for the paycheque, remaining choosey. She once complained to an interviewer: “We Black actresses have played so many prostitutes and drug addicts and house maids, always negative. I won’t play that kind of characterless role anymore, even if I have to go back to starving.”
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 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.
She reprised her winning role in the play for a Lifetime Television movie, which was screened at the White House. She returned to Broadway in 2015 opposite James Earl Jones for a revival of “The Gin Game.”
Tyson made her movie debut in the late 1950s with small roles in such films as “Odds Against Tomorrow,” “The Last Angry Man,” and “The Comedians.” She played the romantic interest to Sammy Davis Jr.‘s
jazz musician in “A Man Called Adam.”
She played a role in the 1968 drama “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” that was hailed by a reviewer as “an absolute embodiment of the slogan ‘Black is beautiful.’ ” In “Roots,” the 1977 miniseries that became one of the biggest events in TV history, she played Binta, mother of the protagonist, Kunta Kinte, played by LeVar Burton.