Cicely Tyson, Pioneering Hollywood Icon, Dies at 96
Source: Variety
Cicely Tyson, Pioneering Hollywood Icon, Dies at 96
By Carmel Dagan
Cicely Tyson Dead: Pioneering Hollywood Icon
Harpo, Inc.
Emmy- and Tony-winning actress Cicely Tyson, who distinguished herself in theater, film and television, died on Thursday afternoon. She was 96.
“I have managed Miss Tyson’s career for over 40 years, and each year was a privilege and blessing,” her manager, Larry Thompson, said in a statement. “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.”
Throughout her career Tyson refused to play drug addicts, prostitutes or maids, roles she thought demeaning to Black women. But when a good part came along she grabbed hold of it with tenacity.
Onstage she was in the original 1961 Off Broadway production of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” and, decades later, she won a Tony for her starring role in a revival of “The Trip to Bountiful.”
Read more: https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/cicely-tyson-dead-dies-1234895188/
= new reply since forum marked as read
By Adam Bernstein
Jan. 28, 2021 at 7:19 p.m. EST
Cicely Tyson, an actress whose electrifying portrayals of resilient Black women — foremost in the 1974 TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” but also as Coretta Scott King and Harriet Tubman — brought some of the first ennobling portrayals of African Americans to a vast television audience, died Jan. 28. She was 96.
Ms. Tyson had shrouded her age until recently. For much of her career, she convincingly presented herself as 15 years younger than she was, and she continued to appear on-screen and in Broadway roles past what was her 90th birthday. Her family announced the death in a statement shared with the Associated Press by her manager Larry Thompson. Additional details were not immediately available.
Regal in bearing, with willowy beauty and delicately chiseled features, Ms. Tyson was known for embodying women of great poise striving under great pressure. Her life had been strewn with obstacles and marked by periods of tumult: a childhood of desperate poverty, a deeply religious mother who considered her daughter’s career choice “sinful,” and a tempestuous, much-examined celebrity marriage to jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in the 1980s. Also looming over her career were the persistent limitations in an entertainment industry that cast Black women in demeaning roles as prostitutes, drug addicts, and housemaids.
Ms. Tyson said she refused many such roles offered to her, vowing to accept only parts of “strength, pride and dignity.” Because of her uncompromising selectivity, she was out of work for months and sometimes years at a stretch, even after her breakthrough, Oscar-nominated performance as a sharecropper’s wife in “Sounder” (1972), a drama set in the Depression-era South. “I wait for roles — first, to be written for a woman, then, to be written for a black woman,” she told the Entertainment News Service in 1997. “And then I have the audacity to be selective about the kinds of roles I play. I’ve really got three strikes against me. So, aren’t you amazed I’m still here?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/cicely-tyson-dead/2021/01/28/c72969e4-483c-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html
Dammit! This year is not starting off well for our entertainers and this one was the heart and soul.
I was just watching her interview with Gayle King just a few days ago.....
They broke the in on Joy Reid's show with the news 
But 96, yay for her!
I'm aiming for a cogent, still creative 95
oop forgot
May you reincarnate into an America free from systemic racism & sexism! And very, Very few bigots left in the whole country!
(...and certainly deserved better than Miles Davis)
Rest in Peace.
Great actress and she chose great parts.
She was one of my favorites. I don't remember when it was I fell in love with her, but have always thought so much of her.
