THE CHANGE MAKER (REMEMBERING CICELY TYSON)

 

Amid all the tributes to Cicely Tyson following her passing, one aspect of her career particularly shone through.

Celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Kerry Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Michelle Obama and Viola Davis, all spoke glowingly about her determination to change how African American women were portrayed.

The women Tyson played were often strong, tenacious and dignified.

Born in Harlem in 1924, she would build a Tony and Emmy Award-winning career.

And she would also go on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her career from President Barack Obama in 2016. 

Raised in a churchgoing family, her father was a painter and carpenter and mother was a domestic cleaner.

Both were immigrants from the West Indies.

Cicely attended an Episcopal Church in East Harlem and the Charles Evans High School.

She initially secured work as a model after being discovered by a photographer for Ebony magazine and enrolled in the Actors' Studio.

When she informed her mother she wanted to be an actress, she was met with opposition.

However Tyson learned her craft through small theatre productions and was able to win over her mum to the idea that she could build a viable acting career when she attended one of her plays.

At the age of 17, she had a daughter whose name she kept secret but refers to as Joan in her recently published memoir.

A year later, she married Kenneth Franklin but divorced him for abandoning the marriage after four months.

Building a reputation for herself through theatre, Cicely started to secure minor roles in film and television including on the NBC series 'Frontiers of Faith' in 1951 and in Harold Young's B movie 'Carib Gold' with Ethel Waters.

More roles followed in films like Robert Wise's 1959 film noir 'Odds Against Tomorrow' with Harry Belafonte and Daniel Mann's 'The Last Angry Man' with Paul Muni and Billy Dee Williams.

On Broadway, she started to catch the eye of audiences in the early 1960s in shows like the original production of Jean Genet's 'The Blacks' alongside other notable names such as James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou and Louis Gossett Jr.

There was a Vernon Rice Award for her performance in the Trinidadian playwright Errol John's 'Moon on a Rainbow Shawl' alongside James Earl Jones.

These performances landed her in 1963 the part of George C Scott's secretary in the CBS drama 'East Side/West Side' and she also secured a regular role on a CBS soap opera 'The Guiding Light'.

Sammy Davis Jr was her love interest in Leo Penn's 1966 drama 'A Man Called Adam' in which the Rat Pack star played a jazz cornetist with self-destructive tendencies.

During the 1960s, she became romantically involved with the jazz great Miles Davis who featured her on the cover of his 1967 album 'Sorcerer'.

Her relationship with the trumpeter would be on-off until they married in 1981 at a ceremony conducted by the Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young at the home of Bill Cosby.

The marriage ended in 1988 because of his philandering.

In 1967, she was among a cast led by Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness and Peter Ustinov in Peter Glenville's adaptation of Graham Greene's political thriller 'The Comedians'.

The film received mixed reviews despite the author adapting his own work.

However it was her performance as Portia Copeland, the daughter of Percy Rodriguez's embittered doctor in  Robert Ellis Miller's acclaimed movie of Carson McCullers' 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' with Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke that brought her to the attention of audiences.

She followed this in 1972 with her breakthrough role as Rebecca Morgan in Martin Ritt's 'Sounder', a drama about an African American sharecropper family in 1930s Louisiana.

A huge hit with critics, it landed Tyson an Oscar nomination.

However her performance as a mother battling to keep her family together was not able to capture the Best Actress statuette which went instead to Liza Minnelli's performance as Sally Bowles in 'Cabaret'.

Tyson would receive an honorary Oscar in 2018 but it was her subtle work in Ritt's movie alongside Paul Winfield as her husband that will be remembered as arguably her finest screen performance.

A sequel 'Part 2, Sounder' was released in 1976 to indifferent reviews but Tyson and most of the original cast, with the exception of the blues musician Taj Mahal, did not take part nor did director Martin Ritt.

In 1974, she took on the role of a former slave who gets arrested during a Civil Rights protest in John Korty's CBS movie 'The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman'.

A critical and commercial hit, the production earned Tyson a Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie Emmy and a BAFTA nomination in the UK.

More notable television roles followed.

In ABC's classic miniseries of Alex Hailey's slavery drama 'Roots,' she portrayed Binta, the mother of the Gambian born-hero Kunta Kinte and landed a Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie Emmy nomination.

There was another Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie Emmy nomination for her performance as Martin Luther King's wife Coretta Scott King alongside Paul Winfield in Abby Mann's 1978 NBC miniseries 'King' - even though the network was disappointed by the ratings.

In 1981, she captured the NAACP's Image Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actress and earned another Best Actress Emmy nomination for her inspirational lead performance as a teacher who in real life started her own school in the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie, 'The Marva Collins Story' with Morgan Freeman.

Richard T Heffron's 1986 CBS TV movie 'Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story' would see her work with Martin Sheen in an acclaimed story about a homeless activist and she would win another NAACP award.

In 1989, Tyson appeared in the ABC miniseries 'The Women of Brewster Place' alongside Oprah Winfrey, Shari Belafonte and Paul Winfield in which she played the mother of Robin Givens' character Kiswana. 

She joined Kathy Bates, Mary Louise Parker, Mary Stuart Masterson and Jessica Tandy in Jon Avnet's 1991 movie of Fannie Flagg's novel 'Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café' as Sipsey, the mother of Stan Shaw's Big George in a tale that resonated with critics and audiences.

There was a lead role in 1994 in the NBC legal drama series 'Sweet Justice' which over 22 episodes saw her civil rights campaigning lawyer join forces with Melissa Gilbert's attorney to fight a range of discrimination cases.

Tyson would again receive an Emmy nomination and a Screen Actors Guild nomination for her performance.

The 1994 CBS miniseries 'Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All' saw her play a house slave, capturing her a third Emmy - this time for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries - for her work alongside Diane Lane, Donald Sutherland and Anne Bancroft.

In 1997, Tyson joined Laurence Fishburne, Tim Roth and Andy Garcia in Bill Duke's gangster drama 'Hoodlum' in which she played the infamous criminal Madame Queen but the film failed to capture the imagination of audiences or critics.

Tyson played the aunt of Mehki Pfifer's man accused of killing a shop owner in a racist attack in Joseph Sargent's Emmy award winning HBO movie 'A Lesson Before Dying' with Don Cheadle and Irma P Hall.

Wayne Wang directed her, Jeff Daniels, Eva Maria Saint and Dave Matthews in the 2005 family comedy drama 'Because of Winn-Dixie' about a dog which was a minor box office success despite lukewarm reviews.

She played Kimberly Elise's mother in Tyler Perry's critically lambasted 2005 romcom 'The Diary of a Mad Black Woman' - although the critic Roger Ebert singled both of their performances out for praise in an otherwise weak vehicle.

Perry directed her again in a supporting role alongside Louis Gossett Jr as an elderly couple in the underwhelming 2010 romcom 'Why Did I Get Married Too?' with Janet Jackson.

She narrated the acclaimed documentary 'Up from the Bottoms: The Search for the American Dream'.

The following year Tyson appeared as Constantine, a maid who raised Allison Janney's character Charlotte but is then fired in Tate Taylor's Mississippi civil rights drama 'The Help' with Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Viola Davis, Sissy Spacek, Octavia Spencer and Bryce Dallas Howard.

A huge hit critically and commercially, the film figured prominently during awards season.

In 2013, Tyson appeared in a Broadway revival of Horton Foote's 'A Trip to Bountiful' as Miss Carrie Watts, an elderly woman who has to move into an apartment with her son and a daughter-in-law who detests her.

At the age of 88, she became the oldest winner of a Tony Award for Best Actress for her performance.

Still going strong, she had a striking role in Tom Elkins' 2013 horror movie 'The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia' but it failed to connect with audiences and critics and only made a modest profit.

There was a recurring role as Viola Davis' defense attorney Annalise Keating's overprotective mother who succumbs to dementia in the hit ABC series 'How to Get Away with  Murder,' earning her more Emmy nominations in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 for her guest appearances.

Tyson appeared again in a Tyler Perry thriller 'A Fall From Grace' which was a hit for Netflix in 2020 despite unfavorable reviews with Crystal Fox and Phylicia Rashad.

It would be her last film role.

A godmother to the singer Lenny Kravitz, Denzel Washington's daughter Katia and Tyler Perry's son Adam, she published her memoirs just days before her death 

Interviewed by CBS's Gayle King during the promotion of the book, Tyson was asked how she would like to be remembered.

"I've done my best. That's all," she said.

She certainly did her best and her impact will be felt for generations to come.

(Cicely Tyson passed away at the age of 96 on January 28, 2021)