By 
Cicely Tyson, Iconic and Influential Actress, Dies at 96
(CNN) Cicely Tyson, an award-winning icon of the stage and screen who broke barriers for Black actresses with surpassing dignity, died Thursday, her longtime manager Larry Thompson confirmed to CNN.
She was 96. A family statement did not reveal the cause of death.
The actress chronicled her lengthy career in her first memoir, “Just As I Am,” which was just released Tuesday.
Tyson embodied African American women who demanded attention — and more than that, respect. She played former slaves, civil rights icons, sharecroppers, truthtellers, mothers and other complicated women — bringing a sense of depth, nobility and grace to every character.
Cicely Tyson, Iconic and Influential Actress, Dies at 96
Her filmography includes some of the most celebrated movies and television shows featuring Black women in major roles: “Sounder” (1972), “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” (1974), “Roots” (1977), “The Marva Collins Story” (1981), “The Women of Brewster Place” (1989), and “The Help” (2011).
Yet she said her most important accomplishment happened in 2016 when President Barack Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom.
“In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only exceeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history,” Obama said that day.
Tyson described that moment as “the most important thing that could happen to me.”
“I am one of three children, grew up in the area that is now known as El Barrio and that was the East Side (of New York),” she told TV host Steve Harvey. “To come from there to the White House with the first black President … to put that medal around my neck: Where can you go from there?”
Tyson continued to act well into her 90s, telling Time magazine that she had no plans to retire.
“We have to honor this blessed gift that we have. That’s what keeps you going. Keeps your mind fluid — your heart, your whole being,” Tyson, then 94, said. “You can’t just stop, because that will be the end of you.”
Tyson was born December 19, 1924, in New York to William and Theodosia Tyson. Early on, she gravitated toward performing, playing piano and reciting in her family’s church when she was a child. She later attended New York University.
Tyson said she was “the bane of her mother’s existence” because she couldn’t keep still when she was little.
“I was always going, I was always trying to find things, learn things, make things,” she told Harvey. “So I drove her crazy.”
As an adult, Tyson began her entertainment career as a model when she was discovered by a fashion editor at Ebony magazine in the 1950s. She had substantial theater parts in the early part of the decade and was on television regularly in guest-starring roles by the mid-1960s.
It wasn’t until “Sounder” in 1972 that she had her big breakout movie role. She portrayed the family matriarch in the film about Depression-era sharecroppers and their hunting dog, based on a William H. Armstrong novel.
She was nominated for an Academy Award for her work in the film — her only Oscar nomination. It would be another 45 years before she took home the golden statue when she received an honorary Oscar in 2018, the only Black woman to do so.
In 1974, she starred in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” a television movie based on a novel by Ernest Gaines. Tyson was the title character, a woman born into slavery who lives well into the 20th century and takes part in African Americans’ struggles for civil rights.
The death of renowned actress Cicely Tyson Thursday drew an outpouring of grief and an array of tributes from Hollywood and far beyond.
Comments