Cicely Tyson
Cicely Tyson is an actor, born 1924.
Seven decades is not a figure of speech in Cicely Tyson's case. She was on East Side/West Side in 1963 and still working on Cherish the Day in 2020, and what came between is a filmography of African American women written and played as difficult, dignified and specific, at a time when very little of that was on offer.
The early 1970s are the peak. Sounder in 1972 and the title role in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1974 put her at the centre of two of the decade's most visible American stories about Black life, and Roots followed in 1977 with Binta. Across her career she won three Emmy Awards, a Peabody and a Tony, was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, and was given the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 and an honorary Academy Award in 2018.
The last twenty-five years were a different job and she was excellent at that too. Directors used her as an instant moral centre: Sipsey in Fried Green Tomatoes, Stephanie St. Clair in Hoodlum, Gloria Dump in Because of Winn-Dixie, Constantine Jefferson in The Help, Nana Mama in Alex Cross, Myrtle in two Tyler Perry pictures, Ophelia Harkness on How to Get Away with Murder. Give her one scene and the register of the entire show changed for the length of it, then changed back when she left. That is a technical achievement rather than a matter of presence. She died in 2021, still taking work.
Movies (22)
- The Help (2011)
- Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
- The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia (2013)
- Hoodlum (1997)
- A Fall from Grace (2020)
- Alex Cross (2012)
- Madea's Family Reunion (2006)
- The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979)
- Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005)
- Because of Winn-Dixie (2005)
- The Blue Bird (1976)
- Idlewild (2006)
- Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010)
- Last Flag Flying (2017)
- Bustin' Loose (1981)
- The Comedians (1967)
- Always Outnumbered (1998)
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968)
- Ms. Scrooge (1997)
- Sounder (1972)
- The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974)
- The Women of Brewster Place (1989)
TV (9)
Where to start with Cicely Tyson
Two films from the 1970s are the essential ones. Sounder is where to start, a quiet Depression-era sharecropping drama in which Tyson plays a mother holding a family together and turns down every chance to make it sentimental. Then The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, where she carries a single woman from slavery to the civil rights era across one film. Roots is the third pillar. After that, take the late work on its own terms: Fried Green Tomatoes and The Help are the mainstream ones, Because of Winn-Dixie is unexpectedly the tenderest thing on the list, and How to Get Away with Murder is the guest role that most viewers under thirty know her from. Cherish the Day is the last of it.