Actress Cicely Tyson passed away last week at 96 years old.
She won three primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and an honorary Academy Award.
She was known as an actress who would only accept roles that portrayed African-American women in a positive manner. This left her without many parts to play for long stretches of her career, but she never swayed from her principles.
Two other anecdotes:
1) In 1979 she was the first African-American woman to host Saturday Night Live, and
2) she was married to Miles Davis for eight years in the 1980s.
Here are quotes from Cicely and others that resonated with me.
Vanessa Williams on Cicely Tyson
“She’s our Meryl Streep. She was the person you wanted to be in terms of an actress, in terms of the roles she got and how serious she took her craft. She still is.”
Wesley Morris
“Tyson was a peculiar kind of famous. I was never told of her importance. I just knew. Everybody knew.”
Cicely Tyson, quoted by Wesley Morris:
“My art had to both mirror the times and propel them forward. I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people — to change the way Black women in particular were perceived, by reflecting our dignity.”
Morris:
“Tyson made this vow in 1972, a few years after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at the dawn of the so-called Blaxploitation filmmaking boom that didn’t fulfill her. No hookers, no servants, no big bad mamas.
Which meant that, for a woman dependent on an industry that trained its patrons to overlook a beauty as singular and angular and walnut-brown as hers, she’d essentially declared a hunger strike.”
“At the height of Blaxploitation, she turned down more roles than she accepted, making her living delivering speeches on college campuses.
Keenly aware of her power as a symbol and a role model, she was adamant that her roles perpetuate healthy, positive images.”
Tyson, quoted by Ann Hornaday:
“‘I didn’t think of it as a burden,’ she told me of those years when so many eyes and expectations were on her. ‘I thought that was my mission. I was chosen by the forces that be to serve that purpose…It wasn’t easy. There were things that happened during the course of that time that made me wonder if I would ever survive this life. But I knew that was something I was put here to do. And so I did it.’”
I thought this was interesting…
Ann Hornaday on Tyson’s trust that once the time was right she would be able to embody the character she was playing
“As purposeful as Tyson was in her early work, she was also constantly aware of the mystical forces that were shaping her choices: A chance encounter in a health food store led to her becoming a vegetarian, which she credited with her longevity and remarkable good health (along with energetically walking the streets of her beloved New York City, ‘one end to the other’).
It was that same attunement, that ability to listen, observe and pick up unspoken signals, that accounted for her talent for inhabiting her characters less as people she was playing than as spirits she was channeling.
When she was cast as the 110-year-old title character in ‘Miss Jane Pittman’ in her late 40s, the producers were concerned that she was too young for the role.
‘They were going to build me a hump,’ she recalled. ‘Then one day I was sweeping the floor in my apartment, and my whole left side collapsed. And I held it and I went and looked in the mirror and went to the phone and said, ‘Forget the hump; I found it.’”
Note: Tyson won an Emmy for Best Lead Actress in a Drama for that role.
“The same thing happened when, in her early 90s, she was preparing to star in the Broadway revival of ‘The Gin Game’ with [James Earl] Jones. Her posture was too erect, her physicality too youthful, to be convincing as the cantankerous nursing home resident Fonsia Dorsey.”
Tyson’s explanation of what happened next:
“I said, ‘When it’s time for her body to change, it’ll change.’ And it happened in one of the previews. All of a sudden, I felt this change in my body and her walk was different. . . . It happened when it was supposed to happen.”
“When these incidents occur in my life, I take heed. I move in the direction that I’m getting the message to move in. I could ignore it, but there’s a big price to pay.
You’ve got to listen. And when you hear, you’ve got to follow. . . . Your body, this vessel, this gift, can speak, nothing can speak more loudly to you than your body and your mind. They’ll take care of you in any set of circumstances.”
Cicely Tyson’s memoir was published just two days before her death. It’s currently the #1 non-fiction book on the Amazon best-seller list.
Bakari Sellers recorded a podcast with Tyson just days before she passed away. I have not had a chance to listen to it yet, but I look forward to hearing it soon.
Thanks for reading! Hope you have a fantastic weekend.