Cicely Tyson was an award-winning actress whose decades-long career broke ground for Black women,
while also inspiring generations to come. From her early beginnings to the numerous
honors she'd receive later in life, this is the untold truth of Cicely Tyson.
When asked how she became an actor in an interview with NPR, Cicely Tyson said,
"Well, it happened because I learned that I could speak through other people.
I was a very shy child."
In another interview for Elle magazine, Ms. Tyson said she
never thought of being an actress. She was born into a very religious family,
so her introduction to film, theater, and music came through her church.
In speaking about the impact her church had on her creative output, Tyson had this to say,
"The church was really where, subconsciously,
I was sopping up all of this — whatever I use now — to perform."
Ms. Tyson was discovered by a photographer for Ebony magazine. She was working as a typist in
New York City and enjoyed "perusing" at Lord & Taylor off Fifth Avenue on her lunch break.
One afternoon, according to her interview with NPR,
someone tapped her on the shoulder and said she should be a model.
Soon after, Tyson started sending her photos to agencies and began getting calls.
Cicely Tyson was born in Harlem, New York. Her parents were both working-class immigrants
from Nevis in the West Indies. Cicely's parents divorced when she was very young,
and her mother became her main guardian. While still living at home,
Cicely's modeling career took off. She was featured in top magazines and walked the runways.
Cicely said, in an interview with Time magazine, that when she was approached to work on a film,
her mother told her, quote, "You can't do that." She ended up kicking Cicely out of
the house, and they didn't speak for over a year.
Soon after, Cicely was cast in her first feature film,
Carib Gold, a 1957 B-film taking place in the Florida Keys with a predominantly Black cast.
When asked in her Elle interview if her mother was ever proud of her, Tyson said,
"[W]hen I [acted in the film] [The Autobiography of Miss] Jane Pittman
I was in California — she was still in New York — and I called her and said to her,
"Well? You've got to give me something!" She said, "I am so proud of you."
Tyson told Oprah,
"She, in fact, is responsible for what I have become."
Tyson also credits her mother with being a, quote, "source of energy" she used to prove
she could succeed as an actress, telling the congregation of the Abyssinian Baptist Church,
"I was determined to prove my mother wrong."
In an interview with InStyle, Cicely said she is often credited for starting the natural-hair
movement. In 1962, she auditioned for a role in a CBS drama called Between Yesterday and Today.
Cicely said that the network told her to leave her hair straightened. Tyson,
however, believed the character would wear her hair natural. So she went to a barbershop
in Harlem and had them cut her hair short and shampoo it. On-set, Tyson kept her hair covered
until it was time to shoot. When the director saw her hair, short and natural, he said,
"I wanted to ask you to do it, but I didn't have the nerve."
In 1963, Tyson went on to star in East Side/West Side, a TV show for CBS, and decided to keep her
hair natural. The studio received letters, some praising the decision and some criticizing it.
In recalling the decision to wear her hair natural on East Side/West Side, Tyson had this to say:
"Other people told me I was in a position to glorify Black women,
and I had disgraced them instead. I was not trying to be groundbreaking that day,
but that one small choice still has effects today."
In 1972, Cicely Tyson starred in the film Sounder,
a children's film about a family of sharecroppers and their dog, Sounder.
This role earned Tyson an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role,
making her the second Black woman to receive this honor. After the success of Sounder, she was
offered the leading role in the film Claudine. In an interview with Time magazine, Cicely recalled,
"I once turned down a movie that everybody thought I was crazy to do, because it wasn't the kind of
woman I wanted to project. Another actress did it, and she got a nomination for an Oscar."
That woman was Diahann Carroll, who played the title role in Claudine. Cicely told Elle,
"It has never been easy for us to get roles — roles of enough substance, of any substance..."
Despite the scarcity of roles, Cicely Tyson remained picky about which ones she took.
She cared a lot about how her image as a Black woman was projected,
and it was a decision she never regretted. A week after turning down Claudine, she was
given the chance to star in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, for which she won two Emmys.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was a made-for-TV movie
about a woman who was 110 years old in the 1960s and a former slave.
When discussing her preparation for the lead role of Jane Pittman to Elle, Tyson said,
"I did a tremendous amount of research. I need to feel as though I am in the person's skin."
To get the hang of playing an elderly person, she visited a nursing home
and spent time with those older than her — noting how they talked, walked,
and held themselves. The TV movie racked up 13 Emmy nominations, not to mention two more
wins for Tyson, who said that the movie, quote, "marked the end of my anonymity."
That kind of attention to detail was typical for Tyson. In 2013, Tyson starred in the Broadway
revival of The Trip to Bountiful. To prepare for the role, she went to Texas, where the play was
set, because she had never been there before. CBS also decided to make an entire behind-the-scenes
documentary about her trip. Tyson visited the small town of Wharton, where the playwright
Horton Foote grew up and wrote about in Bountiful. Cicely Tyson won a Tony Award for her performance.
After reading the book Roots, Cicely Tyson met with the book's author,
Alex Haley. The two became fast friends, and soon after, Tyson was granted the part of Binta,
Kunta Kinte's mother. The film was released in 1977, and Tyson was again nominated for an Emmy.
Like all other parts she played, Tyson did a lot of research, but this time,
she went to Africa before getting the part. She went to the former Kingdom of Dahomey,
now called Benin, a country west of Nigeria. Tyson told an interviewer,
"I had an opportunity to get a feel of the country itself. Made lots of notes,
take the dialogue [in], just wanting to get to know who my forefathers were.
I spent a lot of time with the women, not being aware that this role was forthcoming."
According to an interview she did with Oprah, Cicely Tyson's mother
passed away right before she landed the role of Binta. She spoke with Oprah about
how she was able to use her grief to bring her character to life, stating,
"I think that I have profited more from the negative as opposed to the positive. [...] I
really relish and treasure them more than positive. [...] It has enriched my life more."
Miles Davis and Cicely Tyson met in New York in 1966.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Davis remarked,
"She had a different kind of beauty that you didn't usually see in Black women on television;
she was very proud-looking and had a kind of inner-burning fire that was interesting."
In 1967, Davis used Tyson's face for the cover of his album, Sorcerer. According to Miles: The
Autobiography, by 1968, Davis had married another woman, Betty Mabry, and they divorced in 1969.
Shortly after his divorce, there was a long period where Davis sank into a deep cocaine addiction.
Toward the end of the '70s, at the height of her career, Cicely Tyson came back into Davis' life.
She helped him deal with his addiction, and the two married on Thanksgiving Day in 1981
at the home of Bill Cosby. Miles began composing music again
and released two albums, one of which had a song titled "Star on Cicely."
Miles Davis wrote of how the couple had trouble getting along and fought regularly.
He even confessed to having an affair days after their wedding. While their relationship was on the
downslope for many years, it was not until 1989 that their divorce was final. In 1991, Miles was
hospitalized for organ failure after decades of drug and alcohol abuse. Tyson told Radio Andy,
"He needed, at the time I met him, someone to save him from the life of destruction he was living."
Tyson was not able to see him before he died, but a friend of hers relayed a message from Davis:
"Tell Cicely I'm sorry. Tell her I'm very, very sorry."
Before Cicely Tyson became a household name, she was a stage performer.
Her first performance was at the Little Theater in Harlem in 1957 for a play called Dark of the Moon.
In 1959, she was an understudy for Eartha Kitt in the Broadway play
Jolly's Progress. Her most notable success would be in the play The Blacks, written by
French playwright Jean Genet. The show ran for 1,408 performances at the St. Mark's Theater.
Tyson's breakout role on East Side/West Side in 1963 may have slowed her stage career down,
but it didn't stop it. Cicely came back here and there, such as for Carry Me Back
to Morningside Heights in 1968 and the Corn is Green in 1983. According to Broadway.com,
it would be three decades until Tyson returned to Broadway for her Tony-winning turn
in The Trip to Bountiful. Upon accepting the award, Tyson said,
"I had this burning desire to do one more. One more
great role. I didn't want to be greedy; I just wanted one more."
Well, she did two more. Her final play was in 2015, opposite James Earl Jones in The Gin Game.
On November 22, 2016, Cicely Tyson, along with 20 other recipients, was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was 91 years old. Like her character Jane Pittman, Tyson had
lived through decades of slow progress — in this case to finally seeing the first Black president.
In 2018, Cicely Tyson was honored by Turner Movie Classics with a
hand-and-footprint ceremony in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Then, in 2019,
Cicely Tyson became the first woman of color to receive an Honorary Academy Award. At age 94,
she walked the red carpet, causing both the crowd, as well as her fellow actors, to cheer loudly.
Cicely Tyson died on January 28, 2021, only two days after her memoir Just As I Am was released.
She was in the middle of a book tour and had no plans of slowing down. According to Vulture,
she did her last interview on Live with Ryan & Kelly just a day before she passed.
When asked by Time magazine in 2019 on why she hadn't yet retired, she said,
"The reason why I have been in this universe as long as I have been
is because he's not ready for me. When I've completed my job, he'll take me away."
Tyson was still working to the end, having recently completed a recurring role on How
to Get Away With Murder. There was an outpouring of lamentations over the icon's death from the
many fans and actors she inspired, specifically Black women. Viola Davis even wrote an entire
article for Vanity Fair about how Cicely Tyson was always her, quote, "muse." After Tyson's death,
numerous celebrities paid homage. In a touching remembrance, Viola Davis stated:
"[Because of Cicely Tyson, I felt] valued in a world where there is
still a cloak of invisibility for us dark chocolate girls."
Kerry Washington also described Tyson as a, quote, "foretaste of glory." Zendaya,
meanwhile, proclaimed Tyson as, quote, "one of the greatest to ever do it."
That's something we can all agree on.
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