Groundbreaking, hardworking, award-winning, and legendary are just some of the many words to describe a barrier-breaking actress who had anyone who saw her on the silver or small screen for nearly eight decades of her career. She had a command on screen that put on display her grace, power, and vulnerability that she seem to wield at will. This legend, who earned respect from those that watch her to those in politics who because of her courage to stand up for what was right has made life for many minorities better because of it. We lost this powerful icon of entertainment just two days before a latest project.
On Thursday afternoon, multi-award-winning
actress Cecily Tyson passed away at the age of 96, just two days before the
release of her memoir, “Just as I Am.” She was 96 years old and is survived by
an unknown daughter.
The news of three-time Emmy, Screen Actors
Guild, Tony, and honorary Oscar Award winner’s passing was announced by her
family through her manager Larry Thompson, who did not provide any additional
immediate details about how she died.
“With a heavy heart, the family of Miss
Cecily Tyson announces her peaceful transition this afternoon,” Ms. Tyson’s
family said in a statement through Mr. Thompson. “At this time, please allow
the family their privacy.”
Mr. Thompson also shared in a statement to
“Variety” about his legendary client, “I have managed Miss Tyson’s career for
over 40 years, and each year was a privilege and blessing. Cicely thought of
her new memoir as a Christmas tree decorated with all the ornaments of her
personal and professional life. Today she placed the last ornament, a Star, on
top of the tree.”
On Thursday night, the marquee outside the
famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem, NY, where Ms. Tyson was born was lit up in her
memory, which read, “Rest in Peace Pioneering Icon Cicely Tyson December
19,1924-January 28, 2021.”
Ms. Tyson was a driving force, who lead
the way in how African Americans and other minorities were depicted on
television and in movies during the 1970s, like in the 1972 silver screen 20th
Century Fox drama “Sounder,” where she portrayed Rebecca Morgan, a hardworking
mother. That role earned Ms. Tyson a Golden Globe nomination, a best actress
Oscar nomination and the Governor’s Award.
“I don’t know that I would cherish a
better gift than this,” Ms. Tyson said upon receiving that accolade then. “This
is the culmination of all those years of have and have-not.”
In her last interview before her passing
to promote her memoir, Ms. Tyson said to Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest on
Wednesday’s edition of the syndicated talk show “Live with Kelly and Ryan,” who
said that she was a devoted fan of their show that she was not the first choice
to play Rebecca Morgan in “Sounder.” Tyson got the role after a pay dispute led
another actress, Gloria Foster to turn the role down. Ms. Tyson also said to
Ripa and Seacrest that she and Foster ended up being good friends.
“I never really worked for money. I worked
because there were certain issues that I wish were addressed about myself and
my race as a Black woman,” Tyson said to Ripa and Seacrest.
In 1974, Ms. Tyson won two Emmys in “The
Autobiography of Jane Pittman,” where she played a woman who aged from a young
slave at the end of the Civil War to a woman who joined the Civil Rights
movement at 110 years old.
This made for television movie came three
years before Ms. Tyson’s role in the acclaimed mini-series movie “Roots,” where
she played Binta, the mother of the main character Kunta Kinte.
Eight years later, Ms. Tyson won her third
Primetime Emmy for “The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.”
Ms. Tyson was an actress who refused to
take part in any what she called the sex-and-violence blaxploitation films that
portrayed Africa American women in a negative light.
She felt that if that work did not “really
say something,” Ms. Tyson was not interested in being a part of it. Any work
that, Ms. Tyson needed to know that it “served a purpose.”
“It has always been my mission to get
people to understand that we are also human…Why we should be treated
differently simply because of the color of our skin is far beyond me,” she said
to The Hollywood Reporter eight years ago.
One of those instances consisted of
colorblind casting was when Tyson was casted in Ethel Barrymore’s short-lived
1983 revival of “The Corn is Green,” about Welsh coal miners.
Ms. Tyson added that she set out to “break
the mold and the concept that limited people’s vision of what we as Black
women, or Black actresses, could do in this business.”
Also, in 2013 at the age of 88, Tyson
returned to Broadway for the first time in three decades as she starred in the
first All-African American revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,”
at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York, NY. Ms. Tyson won the 2013 Tony
Award for her betrayal of Miss Carrie Watts, a Texas woman who is unhappy
living with her daughter-in-law and son, who does not take her side, and yearns
to return to the small town of Bountiful, TX, where she was raised. The play
was turned into a Lifetime television movie, for which she earned another Emmy
nomination.
In 2015, Tyson co-starred aside James Earl
Jones on Broadway in the Pulitzer Prize-Winning two-character play “The Gin
Game,” by D.L. Colburn, that was about a thorny friendship in a nursing home.
In 2020, Ms. Tyson earned her 17th
Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series in her role as
Ophelia Harkness, the mother of lead star actress Annalise Keating, played by
Academy, Emmy, and two-time Tony Award winning actress Viola Davis on ABC’s
“How to Get Away with Murder.”
Along with continuing to make her mark in
the theater, Ms. Tyson also continued to shine of the silver screen as a part
of Tyler Perry’s movie franchise in his 2005 film “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,”
where she earned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for her
role as Myrtle, the mother of star Kimberly Elise’s character Helen.
Ms. Tyson also played Myrtle in the 2006
sequel, “Madea’s Family Reunion” and then played the role of Ola, one half of
an elderly couple in the Mr. Perry’s 2010 film “Why Did I Get Married Too?”
In 2011, Ms. Tyson played Constantine
Jefferson in the 2011 DreamWorks Film, “The Help,” which won the Screen Actors
Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
Ms. Tyson was born in Harlem, NY on Dec.
19, 1924 as one of three children to immigrant parents from Nevis in the West
Indies.
She also said in her aforementioned memoir
that she was a shy but observant child who was so drawn to the arts that she
would sneak out of her home in Harlem to listen to concerts.
Ms. Tyson told Ripa and Seacrest that she
sucked her right thumb for her first 12 years of life. That she was an observer
as a child. That when she sat at her family’s table as a child she would sit
and observe what was said and done.
It was through these actions Ms. Tyson
said that she learned why people said and did the things that they did.
Her journey to being a legend in
entertainment began when she was discovered by a photographer for the famed Ebony
magazine, and despite the disapproval of her domestic mother Fredericka and her
carpenter, and painter father William Augustine, Ms. Tyson became a fashion
model and then an actress, which she once said in an interview with “Elle”
magazine that she did not want to be.
“I never wanted to be an actress because
as children there were three of us-I was the middle child-and we spent our time
in church from Sunday morning to Saturday night,” she said. “Any movies we saw
were shown in our church on Thursday night, when they put up a bed sheet and
got a projector.”
Ms. Tyson added, “The church was really
where, subconsciously, I was sopping up all of this—whatever I use now—to
perform.”
Ms. Tyson’s first television acting role
was on the 1951 television series for NBC, “Frontiers of Faith.” Her first film
role came five years later in “Carib Gold,” playing Dottie.
Ms. Tyson’s rise to greatness came out of
necessity though because she confided that in her 1999 acceptance speech at the
New York Women in Film & Television Awards, Tyson’s religious mother threw
her out of the house for wanting to be an actress.
Ms. Tyson said to Ripa and Seacrest that
her mother was very protective of her and her older brother and younger sister
growing up but treated her first daughter like she was the younger of the three
kids.
Tyson said that she and her siblings
performed at their church very often, where she played the organ, piano and
even sang.
“My mother was very protective of us, and
she did not allow us to go any place without her,” she said about how
protective Mrs. Fredericka was of her children. “We spent most of our time in
the church.”
So, Ms. Tyson told Ripa and Seacrest that
she would take it upon herself to take the subway to head up to 14th
street which housed a John Wanamaker’s Department Store where they would hold a
concert for little Caucasian girls that dressed in white and Mary Jane shoes.
Unfortunately, none of those acts featured any girls of color.
Ms. Tyson said that she would sit at the
bottom of the steps of the department store and listen to these concerts each
Saturday.
Her mother never knew her daughter was
gone because she would return home right before she did and her older and
younger siblings never told on her because they too did not know where she
went.
Years later though, Tyson’s mother stood
at the door of her daughter’s dressing room and accepted her congratulations as
if the idea of becoming an actress was her idea.
One particular role that Tyson’s mother,
who was a television junkie, really enjoyed seeing her daughter in was Martha
Frazier on the CBS daytime television soap opera “Guiding Light in 1966, where
Ms. Tyson made history as the first African American actress on a daytime soap
opera.
While Tyson was rising in her professional
life, her personal life was one that was often troubled.
In her just aforementioned release “Just
as I Am,” Tyson wrote very candidly about her tumultuous seven-year marriage to
the famously private great jazz musician Miles Davis, who she married in 1981
in a ceremony conducted by then Atlanta, GA mayor Andrew Young at the home of
Bill Cosby. Tyson dated the jazz trumpeter in the 1960s when he was in the
process of divorcing dancer Frances Davis. He even used a photo of Tyson for
his 1967 album, “Sorcerer,” telling the press then he intended to marry Tyson
in March 1968 once his divorce was finalized, but he married singer Betty Davis
in September of that year.
Davis and Tyson rekindled things a decade
later and got married on Nov. 26, 1981 and resided in both Malibu, CA and New
York, NY. Unfortunately, Mr. Davis’ very volatile temper and infidelity is what
brought their marriage to an eventual end when their divorce was made final in
1989, just two years before Mr. Davis’ death in 1991. Davis did credit Tyson
for saving his life by helping him kick his cocaine habit.
Before Davis, Tyson was married to Kenneth
Franklin at age 18 on Dec. 27, 1942. He abandoned Tyson less than 18 months
after they said, “I do.”
While it has been reported that Ms. Tyson
did not have any children, she talked about a daughter, who she calls “Joan” in
her memoir where she delved into the particulars about her birth and childhood.
USA Today wrote
that Tyson and her daughter continued to work on their relationship, which was
as “fragile” as it was “precious,” and Ms. Tyson dedicated her memoir to her
saying in it, “the one who has paid the greatest price for this gift to all.”
Ms. Tyson not only stared in a blazing
series of unforgettable and powerful roles, but roles that reflected our nation
and culture at a time that were in serious upheaval.
By Tyson taking roles where she not only
memorizing lines but spoke out about the injustices that many minorities faced
not just in the entertainment role but in the world at large.
“I decided that I could not afford the
luxury of just being an actress. I had several issues to address, and I chose
my career as my platform,” Ms. Tyson said once about what her role was as an
actress.
That courage and understanding of why she
went about the roles she took as an actress is how she earned a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1997. How in 2010, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) awarded Ms. Tyson the Spingarn Medal for
her contributions to the entertainment industry, her modeling career, and her
support of civil rights.
It also earned her the highest civilian
award, the “Presidential Medal of Freedom,” in 2016 by the first African
American President of our nation Barack Obama.
On Nov. 18, 2018, Ms. Tyson at the age of
94 became the first African American woman to receive an honorary Oscar.
“It stunned me. But it was the culmination
of all those years of just prodding along, and not giving up,” Ms. Tyson told
WABC 7 Eyewitness News’ Kemberly Richardson about that moment.
Ms. Tyson also in 2018 was inducted into
the American Theater Hall of Fame and was chosen to be inducted into the
Television Academy’s Hall of Fame last year.
Ms. Tyson also used her gift of acting to
give back to those that wanted to rise to greatness like she did on the silver
and small screen.
She has been a member of the Black
Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame since 1977 as well as been consistently active in the
Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts in East Orange, NJ, where she
frequently visited and raised millions of dollars for college scholarships for
those students. Ms. Tyson even took some of the students when she was a
recipient at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015.
Ms. Tyson also has connection with East
Orange, NJ because her aunt lived there, where she frequently spent time at her
home.
Ms. Tyson and co-founder Arthur Mitchell
in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Apr. 4, 1968
in Memphis, TN created the Dance Theatre of Harlem in Harlem, NY. She also said
to Ripa and Seacrest that she became a vegetarian after the assassination of
Dr. King.
On Thursday, the world said goodbye to a
legendary actress in Cicely Tyson, who said to Ripa and Seacrest that when she
was a baby that they came upon a woman one day who said to Ms. Tyson’s mother
to take care of the child because she is going to make her “very proud one day”
and that she will take great care of her when she is in her golden years of
life.
Ms. Tyson not only took care of her
mother, but also took care of us through her work on the silver and small
screen by showing us what real courage was. She went from being a child who was
shy but had a dream but also had standards that she would not waiver from.
That courage made Ms. Tyson a legend, created
space for many other African Americans regardless of their circumstances that
they could be anything they wanted to be, like President of the United States
or Vice President, which Barack Obama, who awarded her the Presidential Medal
of Freedom in 2016 or our first elected African American, first woman, and
first Asian American Vice President just nine days ago in Kamala Harris.
While Cicely Tyson, who lived an
incredible 96 years on earth may be gone from a physical standpoint, her legacy
through her School of Performing and Fine Arts will continue.
Ms. Tyson shined a light on what is
possible in this world, and it is up to her students at her school as well as
the many that watched her on the silver and small screen continue the lessons
and dedication that she displayed for so long to make our nation as well as the
world a better place.
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