Trailblazer Breaks Ground Again

Cicely Tyson was first nominated for ‘Sounder’

CICELY TYSON CALLED her friend Arthur Mitchell soon after learning she’d be honored with an Oscar to celebrate her legendary acting career.

A trailblazer like her, the former ballet dancer accompanied her to the Oscars in 1973, when she was nominated for lead actress in “Sounder.” Tyson starred as the matriarch in a sharecropping family struggling to survive during the Great Depression and went on to star in “Roots,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” “The Help” and “The Trip to Bountiful.”

“The Oscars were held on his birthday and he escorted me,” recalls Tyson, 93, “still speechless” about the honor. “Unfortunately, he passed away shortly after I tried to explain to him that I have an Oscar now.”

Tyson, the first black woman to win an honorary Oscar, doesn’t know who will accompany her to the Nov. 18 Governors Awards ceremony now. “There is no way to replace him,” the Harlem native says of Mitchell, the first African-american dancer in the New York City Ballet. “We’d been friends for 50 years. I have not even thought about who’s going to escort me.”

A week after Mitchell’s death, Tyson found out actor Roger Robinson, the man who played her husband on “How to Get Away With Murder,” had died, too. This wasn’t long after Tyson orated “When Malindy Sings” by Paul Laurence Dunbar at music legend Aretha Franklin’s eighthour funeral.

“I was going through some trauma for a while there,” she says. “Every single week, there was somebody passing away. It was difficult to take. I let out a scream that I didn’t know was in my being and I couldn’t stop. Tears were running down my face. It isn’t something you can control or should suppress.

“As my mother said, joy sometimes