Award-winning actress Cicely Tyson has died aged 96, according to a statement released by her manager, Larry Thompson.
“I have managed Miss Tyson’s career for over 40 years, and each year was a privilege and blessing,” Thompson said.
“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.”
Cicely Tyson was a star of stage and screen, known for her powerful portrayals of Black women, often in the face of opposition. She famously resisted exploitation of actors of colour in 1970s Hollywood.
She initially made a name for herself with her role in the 1961 Off Broadway production of The Blacks. In her long career, she won a Tony award for her part in The Trip to Bountiful and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for the 1972 drama Sounder.
Tyson won two Emmy awards for the 1974 TV drama The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, where she played a woman born into slavery who lives to join the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She won another Emmy 20 years later for her role in the Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.
Tributes to Tyson have been pouring in from actors and public figures who worked with her over the years.
Viola Davis, who worked alongside Tyson on How To Get Away With Murder and The Help, said on Twitter: “I’m devastated. My heart is just broken. I loved you so much!! You were everything to me! You made me feel loved and seen and valued in a world where there is still a cloak of invisibility for us dark chocolate girls.”
Barack Obama said: “In her extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson was one of the rare award-winning actors whose work on the screen was surpassed only by what she was able to accomplish off of it. She had a heart unlike any other — and for 96 years, she left a mark on the world that few will ever match.”
Tyson was also famously married to great jazz musician Miles Davies from 1981 to 1988.
She was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2018, and the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame in 2020.
Words by Emily Withers
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