CICELY TYSON

(19 December 1924 - 28 January 2021)

The American actress Cicely Tyson always believed she should only portray women of strength. Born in New York to parents from the Caribbean, she was discovered by a fashion editor at Ebony magazine. With her outstanding physical presence she became a top model. In her twenties she acted off-Broadway and then had small roles in films such as Odds Against Tomorrow with Harry Belafonte and The Last Angry Man with Paul Muni. A Man Called Adam starred Sammy Davis Jr and Louis Armstrong, while The Comedians, a Graham Greene story, was set in Haiti with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The die was cast for the actress to be in films of note. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, from the novel by Carson McCullers, Tyson played Portia. Television was an inevitable part in her career, as well as films like Martin Ritt’s Sounder, about black sharecroppers in the South. Tyson was the star and she gained Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. She was in The River Niger with James Earl Jones, a film about Los Angeles ghetto life. After Airport ’79 and Bustin’ Loose, a comedy with Richard Pryor, came Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe with Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates. On television Tyson played Coretta Scott King in King with Paul Winfield as Martin Luther King. She won a Primetime Emmy for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), about a black woman born into slavery. More recently Tyson appeared in The Help (2011), showing a black maid’s view of her white employers. In 2013 she became, at 88, the oldest recipient of a Tony Award for Best Actress in the play The Trip to Bountiful. Cicely Tyson, who has died aged 96, was first married to Kenneth Franklin and then to the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis from 1981 to 1988. She had had a daughter when she was 17. Here was one of the great black actresses of our time who brought dignity, reverence and inspirational insight to every role she played.

MICHAEL DARVELL