Cicely Tyson won a Tony at 88 after decades of firsts
In June 2013, aged 88, Cicely Tyson won the Tony for Best Actress in a Play for The Trip to Bountiful, making her the oldest winner ever in that category. Half a century before, she had worn the first Afro on American television and been the only Black regular in a TV cast.
She was born in the Bronx on December 19, 1924, to parents from Nevis in the West Indies; her father, a carpenter and painter, came through Ellis Island in 1919, and her mother did domestic work. Raised in East Harlem, she sang in an Episcopal church choir. Her mother so disliked the idea of acting that she stopped speaking to her daughter for a while, relenting only after seeing her perform. A photographer for Ebony discovered her, and she worked as a fashion model before small film parts in the late 1950s. She later trained with Lee Strasberg.
Stage work got her noticed. She was in the original cast of Jean Genet's The Blacks, alongside Maya Angelou and James Earl Jones, which ran for 1,408 performances. The producer David Susskind spotted her there and cast her in the CBS drama East Side/West Side as a secretary to George C. Scott's social worker. That show tackled social issues so directly that one episode about a Black couple in Harlem was blacked out in Atlanta and Shreveport.
Her film breakthrough was Sounder in 1972, playing a mother holding a sharecropping family together, which earned her an Oscar nomination. Two years later she aged across a whole lifetime, from slavery to the eve of the civil rights era, in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, winning two Emmys. On February 10, 1979, Saturday Night Live had a Black woman as its host for the first time when she took the stage.
Her private life crossed paths with jazz. Miles Davis put her photo on the cover of his 1967 album Sorcerer, and they married in 1981; he credited her with saving his life, though the marriage ended in divorce. She kept working into her nineties, earning Emmy nominations as the mother of Viola Davis's character in How to Get Away with Murder, and received an honorary Oscar in 2018. She died on January 28, 2021, two days after her memoir came out.
Source: Cicely Tyson
