Cicely Tyson, groundbreaking award-winning actor, dead at 96

Cicely Tyson, the multi-award winning actress of theater, TV and film, who was also a lifelong force against racial discrimination in society and in the entertainment world, died Thursday at age 96. Her death came only two days after the release of her memoir, "Just as I Am."

News of her passing was announced by her family, via her manager Larry Thompson, who did not immediately provide additional details.

"With heavy heart, the family of Miss Cicely Tyson announces her peaceful transition this afternoon. At this time, please allow the family their privacy," according to a statement issued through Thompson.

Tyson was a pioneer who led the way for change in the depiction of Blacks on screen in the ‘70s. As the hardworking mother in the 1972 drama "Sounder," she received a best actress Oscar nomination. Two years later, she won two Emmy Awards for her performance as a woman who ages to 110 in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman." She earned her third Emmy in 1982 for "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All."

Tyson refused to be in the popular sex-and-violence blaxploitation films that, in her words, projected "negative images of Black women. "Unless a piece really said something, I had no interest in it. I have got to know that I have served some purpose here," Tyson said.

As she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2013, "It has always been my mission to get people to understand that we are also human. … Why we should be treated differently simply because of the color of our skin is far beyond me."

That was the same year when Tyson, then 88, returned to Broadway for the first time in 30 years to star in the first all-black revival of Horton Foote’s "The Trip to Bountiful." She won the Tony Award for her portrayal of the dislocated old Texas woman who yearns to return to the small town where she was raised. The production was also made into a Lifetime TV movie, for which she earned an Emmy nomination.

It was a role Tyson had admired since she saw Geraldine Page in the 1985 movie. In a story Tyson liked to tell, she went to her agent and said, "Get me my ‘Trip to Bountiful,’ and I’ll retire."

Retire, she did not. In 2015, Tyson co-starred on Broadway with James Earl Jones in "The Gin Game," D.L. Colburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-character play about a thorny friendship in a nursing home.

Tyson was born in New York City on Dec. 19, 1924, though some biographies during her "Bountiful" run reported her as nine years younger. To the amusement of Broadway, she refused to confirm either age.

Raised in Harlem, she was discovered by a photographer for Ebony magazine and, despite her parents’ disapproval, became a fashion model and then an actress. In her acceptance speech at the 1999 New York Women in Film & Television Awards, she confided that her religious mother, an immigrant from the island of Nevis, threw her out of the house because she wanted to be an actress. Years later, her mother stood at the door of the star’s dressing room and accepted congratulations as if the whole thing were her idea.

Tyson appeared in the original, legendary production of Jean Genet’s "The Blacks" off-Broadway in 1961 and had minor roles on Broadway and in movies from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s. But her attention-getting career seriously began with "Sounder" and, especially, "Jane Pittman" in 1974.

As Miss Jane Pittman, she aged from a young slave at the end of the Civil War to a woman who joined the Civil Rights movement at 110. The made-for-TV movie came three years before "Roots," in which she played the mother of main character Kunta Kinte. Also, in an early example of colorblind casting on Broadway, she played a role created by Ethel Barrymore in a short-lived 1983 revival of "The Corn is Green," about Welsh coal miners.

In "Just as I Am," Tyson wrote candidly of her troubled marriage to the famously private jazz great Miles Davis from 1981 to 1988. The ceremony was conducted by Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young in the home of Bill Cosby. She was active in the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts in East Orange, New Jersey, and, with dancer Arthur Mitchell, co-founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem as a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In addition to her many honors, she had been a member of the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame since 1977. Most recently, she earned an Emmy nomination for a guest role in ABC's "How to Get Away With Murder" as the mother of series star Viola Davis.

Asked by The Hollywood Reporter how it felt to have such major Black actresses as Davis and Kerry Washington credit her as an inspiration, she said, "If, in fact, I have, in some way, been the inspiration for any of them, I will feel that I have accomplished what I set out to do"

She said she set out "to break the mold and the concept that limited people’s vision of what we, as Black women, or Black actresses, could do in this business."