Fade To Black: Cicely Tyson

Cicely Tyson

(1924-2021)

Very few actors can boast of a back catalogue as prodigious as that of Cicely Tyson. Born in Harlem in 1924, Tyson turned to acting after a successful modelling career in which she graced the covers of esteemed magazines including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. After honing her craft in off-Broadway productions and several small feature films from 1957 onwards, Tyson’s breakout performance came in the 1972 film Sounder as the matriarch of a poor Black sharecropping family in the Depression-plagued South. Her performance garnered her only Oscar nomination, and though she

narrowly missed out, she was rightly awarded an honorary Oscar in 2018 – the first Black woman to receive the accolade.

In her memoir Just as I Am (2021), released days before her death, Tyson writes, “I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people – to change the way Black women in particular were perceived, by reflecting our dignity.” She famously turned down the title role in the 1974 film Claudine (which earned Diahann Carroll an Oscar nomination) because she felt that the character wasn’t the type of Black woman she wanted to project. In 1962, Tyson also became the first Black woman to wear her hair natural on television, trailblazing the natural hair movement.

Undoubtedly the greatest testament to Tyson’s acting ability is the depth and range of roles she was entrusted with. In A Woman Called Moses (1978) she played Harriet Tubman, in King (1978) she played Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s wife, and in the landmark miniseries Roots (1977) she was nominated for an Emmy for portraying Binta, Kunta Kinte’s mother – not to mention her Emmywinning turn as the titular character in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), in which she dramatised nine decades of the heroine’s life. She also won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful (2013) – aged 88 she was the oldest recipient of the award.

Though she started out as a stunningly beautiful model, it was Tyson’s gravitas and poise which buttressed her ability to take on these huge roles across theatre, film, and television over numerous decades. Her exceptional performances speak for themselves, but she will be remembered as someone who took it as her personal responsibility to move the culture forward when she could have just as easily sat back and basked in her fame. That was the true measure of Cecily Tyson and the legacy that she leaves us looking up to. Christopher Deane n