NEW YORK -- Cicely Tyson, the pioneering Black actor who gained an Oscar nomination for her role as the sharecropper's wife in "Sounder," won a Tony Award in 2013 at age 88 and touched TV viewers' hearts in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," died Thursday at age 96.
Tyson's death was announced by her family, via her manager Larry Thompson. "With heavy heart, the family of Miss Cicely Tyson announces her peaceful transition this afternoon. At this time, please allow the family their privacy," he said in a statement.
A onetime model, she began her screen career with bit parts but gained fame in the early 1970s when Black women were finally starting to get starring roles. Tyson refused to take parts simply for the paycheck.
"I'm very selective as I've been my whole career about what I do. Unfortunately, I'm not the kind of person who works only for money. It has to have some real substance for me to do it," she said in 2013.
Tributes from Broadway and Hollywood poured in, including from actress Tracie Thomas, who thanked her for paving the way. "A queen and a trailblazer indeed," she wrote on Twitter. Actress Marlee Matlin wrote: "She was a consummate pro and all class."
Besides her Oscar nomination, she won two Emmys for playing the 110-year-old former slave in the 1974 television drama "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman." A new generation of moviegoers saw her in the 2011 hit "The Help."
In 2018, she was given an honorary Oscar. "I come from lowly status. I grew up in an area that was called the slums at the time," Tyson said then. "I still cannot imagine that I have met with presidents, kings, queens. How did I get here? I marvel at it."
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Writing in "Blacks in American Film and Television," film historian Donald Bogle described Tyson as "a striking figure: slender and intense with near-perfect bone structure, magnificent smooth skin, dark penetrating eyes, and a regal air that made her seem a woman of convictions and commitment. (Audiences) sensed ... her power and range."
"Sounder," based on the William H. Hunter novel, was the film that confirmed her stardom in 1972. Tyson was cast as the Depression-era loving wife of a sharecropper (Paul Winfield) who is jailed for stealing a piece of meat for his family. She is forced to care for their children and tend to the crops.
The New York Times reviewer wrote: "She passes all of her easy beauty by to give us, at long last, some sense of the profound beauty of millions of Black women."
Her performance evoked rave reviews, and Tyson won an Academy Award nomination as best actress of 1972.
In an interview on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel, she recalled that she had been asked to test for a smaller role in the film and said she wanted to play the mother, Rebecca. She was told, "You're too young, you're too pretty, you're too sexy, you're too this, you're too that, and I said, 'I am an actress.'"
In 2013, at the age of 88, Tyson won the Tony for best leading actress in a play for the revival of Horton Foote's "The Trip to Bountiful." It was her first time back on Broadway in three decades, and she refused to turn meekly away when the teleprompter told her to finish her acceptance speech.
"'Please wrap it up,' it says. Well, that's exactly what you did with me: You wrapped me up in your arms after 30 years," she told the crowd. She had prepared no speech. "I think it's presumptuous," she said later. "I burned up half my time wondering what I was going to say."
She reprised her winning role in the play in a Lifetime Television movie, which was screened at the White House. She returned to Broadway in 2015 opposite James Earl Jones for a revival of "The Gin Game."
In "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, Tyson is seen aging from a young woman in slavery to a 110-year-old who campaigned for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
In the touching climax, she laboriously walks up to a "whites only" water fountain and takes a drink as white officers look on.
"It's important that they see and hear history from Miss Jane's point of view," Tyson said. "And I think they will be more ready to accept it from her than from someone younger"
New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael offered her praise: "She's an actress, all right, and as tough-minded and honorable in her methods as any we've got."
