Award-winning actor Tyson dead at 96

Cicely Tyson, the pioneering Black actor who gained an Oscar nomination for her role as the sharecropper’s wife in “Sounder” and 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.

Tyson’s death was announced by her family, via her manager, Larry Thompson, who did not immediately provide additional details.

“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, she began her screen career with bit parts but gained fame in the early 1970s when Black women finally were starting to get starring roles. Tyson refused to take parts simply for the paycheck.

“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,” she said n 2013.

Tributes from Broadway and Hollywood poured in,

Cicely Tyson poses with the Emmy statuettes she won in 1974 for her role in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”

including from Tracie Thomas, who thanked her for paving the way. “A queen and a trailblazer indeed,” she wrote on Twitter. Marlee Matlin wrote: “She was a consumate pro and all class.”

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. “I come from lowly status.Igrewupinanarea 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.”

“Sounder,” based on the William H. Hunter novel, was the film that confirmed her stardom in 1972. Tyson was cast as the Depressionera 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.

Her performance evoked rave reviews, and Tyson won 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 age 88, Tyson won the Tony Award for best leading actress in a play for the revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”

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”

After her “Sounder” and “Miss Jane Pittman” successes, Tyson continued to seek TV roles that had messages, and she succeeded with “Roots” and “King” (about Martin Luther King) and “The Rosa Parks Story.”