actor
Personal Information
Born on December 19, 1933, in New York, NY; daughter of William and Theodosia Tyson; married Miles Davis (a jazz musician), November 1981 (divorced)
Education: Studied drama at New York University, Actors Studio, and with Vinnette Carroll and Lloyd Richards.
Memberships: Co-founder, Dance Theater of Harlem; trustee, Human Family Institute, American Film Institute.
Career
Photographic model during the late 1950s; actress, 1959-; Jewels of Unity jewelry line, designer, 1999-.
Life's Work
In the minds of many, Cicely Tyson is the embodiment of black womanhood. A naturally gifted actress, she nonetheless worked diligently to learn all the nuances of her craft. Although strikingly beautiful, she has refused to get by on her looks, demanding instead to be judged on her professional abilities. Tyson is often given credit for inspiring black American women to embrace African standards of beauty, rather than trying to make themselves over in the image of white America.
In selecting scripts, she has consistently searched for those that will offer a positive image of people of color to the public, and in the process, she has "developed an artistic identity that does not ignore, but actively challenges the two major stereotypes of the black woman in film and drama: the roly-poly, desexed black mammy and the 'high yaller' femme fatale," according to Ms. Because of her choosiness, Tyson has not been a prolific actress, especially in the latter part of her career; few scripts meet her discriminating standards. But the quality of her work--particularly in the landmark films Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman--has assured her of a reputation as one of America's finest dramatic performers.
Tyson was born in the borough of East Harlem, New York, to parents who had emigrated from Nevis, the smallest island in the Caribbean's Windward Island chain. The move to America brought no prosperity to the Tyson family. Cicely's father worked at carpentry, house painting, and whatever other odd jobs he could find; her mother worked as a housekeeper; and Cicely herself stood on the street-corners selling shopping bags to supplement the household income.
Nevertheless, they were forced to rely on welfare to survive, and the actress remembers that more often than not, they ate corn-meal mush for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her mother sought to protect Cicely and her two siblings from the harshness of their environment by keeping them in church as much as possible and forbidding them to associate with the neighborhood children. But young Tyson loved to wander the city and explore its many possibilities, and she frequently hopped onto a bus or subway train and rode to the end of the line, just to see what was there.
Career Began in Modeling
After graduating from Charles Evans Hughes High School in Manhattan, Tyson landed a job as a secretary for the American Red Cross. The monotony of the work soon frustrated her, however. As she told Louie Robinson of Ebony, the day came when she stood up and shouted to her fellow office workers: "I know that God did not put me on the face of this earth to bang on a typewriter for the rest of my life!" Fate intervened a few days later. Tyson, who had always been meticulous about the care of her hair, was asked by her hairdresser to model one of his styles at a fashion show. Her striking presence prompted several onlookers to encourage her to look into a modeling career. Before long she was enrolled in the Barbara Watson Modeling School and was engaged in photo shoots during her lunch breaks from the Red Cross.
It wasn't long before she was able to leave office work behind, for she quickly became one of the top black models in the United States. She earned as much as $65 an hour--a considerable sum during the late 1950s--and graced the covers of mainstream publications such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, as well as those of magazines specifically geared toward a black audience. But for all her success, modeling brought Tyson little satisfaction. "I felt like a machine," she once told a reporter for Time magazine.
Once again fate stepped in to move her along. Tyson was waiting in the offices of Ebony magazine for an appointment with fashion editor Freda DeKnight when she caught the eye of Evelyn Davis, a black character actress. Tyson related the encounter to Ms. : "When I walked by, [Davis] took one look at me and said, 'Lord, what a face!' She said I'd be perfect for a movie then in production called The Spectrum. It was about the problems between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks. I auditioned for the part and I got it. Actually, the film was never released because the money ran out--but here I am."
Tyson's decision to take up acting led to a two-year rift between her and her mother, who considered movies sinful and had always forbidden her children to see them. But with characteristic determination, Tyson ignored all opposition to pursue her chosen goal. She studied at various acting schools, and briefly at New York University, but she had difficulty finding teachers who measured up to her demanding standards. Two who did were Lloyd Richards and Vinnette Carroll. Carroll recalled to Ms. : "There was never any doubt in my mind that Miss Cicely--that's my pet name for her--was going to make it. She had all the qualities needed: an enormous capacity for work (she seemed utterly driven) and for criticism (she was never thrown by it or immobilized). The most noticeable thing about her was her sense of herself. She was her own measuring stick. And she didn't look to the left or the right or talk about how unfair it was for blacks in the arts."
Brought her Talent to the Stage
In 1959 Tyson appeared in Carroll's Off-Broadway revival of the musical The Dark of the Moon, and in a Broadway variety show called Talent '59; she also understudied for Eartha Kitt in the role of Jolly Rivers in Jolly's Progress. Tyson landed a small part in the film Odds Against Tomorrow and a larger one in the courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men, which starred Henry Fonda. When she first auditioned for Twelve Angry Men, Tyson was told she was too chic to play the part of a girl from the slums, and was turned away. "I went home and got myself up in a costume that was out of this world," she recalled to Ms. "I found a skirt that was too big and botched up the hemline. Then I put on a dirty raincoat, sloppy shoes, an old hat, and mussed up my hair." When Tyson returned to the auditions, the office secretary didn't even want to let her in the door, but the casting agent was suitably impressed, and she was hired.
In 1961 Tyson became one of the original cast members of the Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's controversial drama The Blacks. She was in good company: that first cast also included James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Lou Gossett, Jr., Godfrey Cambridge, and Raymond St. Jacques. Tyson played a prostitute named Virtue, and her stunning performance won her a Vernon Rice Award in 1962. Her other New York theater work included Cool World, God's Trombones, Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, The Blue Boy in Black, and Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights. She was willing to try almost any sort of role, but steadfastly refused to sing or dance: although perfectly capable of both, she felt that blacks were never expected to do anything else, and wished to break away from that stereotype.
In the early 1960s, Tyson became one of the few black faces to be seen regularly on television. Actor George C. Scott had admired her work in The Blacks and asked her to play a continuing role in his television series East Side/West Side, a CBS-TV series about social workers. The short, natural hairstyle she wore in that show caused a sensation and is often singled out as the beginnings of the Afro trend. According to Ms. , "the first young black actress to face film and television cameras with hair unstraightened...provoked a not-too-minor earthquake within the American minds of young black women.... All black women needed was some public person to take the first step toward a more positive identification with African beauty. And that person was Cicely Tyson." Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Film and Television, commented: "Tyson was 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.... Watching the young Tyson, one often has the feeling that, through the turn of a line or a look or gesture, at any moment something extraordinary could happen."
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s Tyson was a frequent guest star on television, appearing in I Spy, Naked City, The Nurses, The Bill Cosby Show, and many other programs. Her film career progressed more slowly. She played the love interest to Sammy Davis, Jr.'s jazz musician character in the 1966 movie A Man Called Adam, appeared in The Comedians in 1967, and turned in an affecting, if brief, performance as a doctor's rebellious daughter in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968. But by then, the film industry was entering the period of so- called "blaxploitation" films, which Tyson considered depressing and demeaning. According to People Tyson said "she would rather be unemployed than act in exploitation films like Shaft and Superfly, " adding that "The lesser of two evils for me is to wait, rather than do something that isn't right." For nearly six years, she hardly appeared before the cameras at all, with the exception of an occasional television guest spot. There were no parts being offered that she felt were worth taking--and she was even ready to forsake her acting career altogether, if it came to that.
Fortunately, it didn't. Some six years after beginning work on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Tyson was offered the role of Rebecca Morgan in the film adaptation of William H. Armstrong's novel Sounder. The story was a major departure from standard Hollywood fare of that time in that it depicted a black family in the Depression-era South with dignity and sensitivity. Tyson's Rebecca is a sharecropper's wife who is forced to carry on alone after her husband is jailed for stealing a piece of meat to feed his family. "Cicely Tyson is superb," enthused Jay Cocks in his Time review of the film. "It falls to her not only to display warmth toward her family but also to show such shreds of defiance and muted fury [against] a world that has always threatened to grind her down. For its range and its richness, and for its carefully portioned power, it is an indelible performance."
Showed Audiences the Beauty of Black Women
As it had in East Side/West Side, Tyson's hairstyle provoked a great deal of comment. In Sounder, she appeared in cornrows, long associated with degrading caricatures of southern blacks, and she was praised for elevating this traditional style to a new level of acceptability. Ellen Holly, a reviewer for the New York Times, commented: "Tyson has always been a lovely actress, easily capable of enameled glamour when it is called for. But here...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."
Ms. declared that Tyson had broken new ground in the portrayal of black motherhood: "Before Cicely Tyson's internationally acclaimed portrayal of Rebecca...the three major exceptions to the black mother as mammy were Louise Beavers and Louise Stubbs in the two versions of Imitation of Life in 1934 and 1959 respectively, and Ethel Waters in Pinky, a controversial film of 1949. Even these two stories were less than redeeming. In both, the black child was a fair-skinned daughter passing for white.... These celluloid mulattoes were often played by white actresses and interpreted as likeable, but doomed by that awful drop of black blood.... Cicely Tyson's Rebecca was different. Through her, the American audience was introduced to a typical black mother and wife; hard-working, resilient, vigilant, and above all, sensitive."
The critical acclaim over Sounder had not yet died away when Tyson turned in another world-class performance in the title role of the television drama The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. This fictional account, adapted from the novel by Ernest J. Gaines, follows the life of a 110-year-old woman from her childhood in slavery to her old age, when she becomes an active participant in the civil rights movement. The role required Tyson to age some 90 years. An astounding make-up job helped her to achieve this feat, but it could not have been successful without her masterful acting skills. She showed her dedication to the project by enduring as much as six hours of make-up application, then working for up to seven hours in front of the cameras.
The finished film was a triumph that delivered a powerful statement about the struggle of African Americans to achieve economic and political self-determination. Ms. characterized Tyson's acting as "almost eerie in its accuracy. Every gesture was right on target--from the way she walked to the white drinking fountain, her head and hands trembling only from age, to the way she held her mouth as she drank, chewing slightly as if her bridge did not fit properly." New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael declared: "She's an actress, all right, and as tough-minded and honorable in her methods as any we've got."
Tyson's performances in Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman won her many accolades, but the entertainment industry itself had changed but little. She continued to seek out challenging, meaningful roles, but few existed for a serious black actress. She gave a very brief performance in the television mini-series Roots as Kunta Kinte's mother, portrayed real-life Chicago educator Marva Collins in The Marva Collins Story, paid tribute to Martin Luther King in the mini-series King, and worked with several other top black actresses in The Women of Brewster Place.
Yet while television offered Tyson more topical material than that being treated in feature films, "sometimes the standard TV-ish quality of TV films...seemed to strand her," in the opinion of Bogle. He continued: "In some cases, too, she appeared either miscast as in King or stuck with a script's undeveloped character as in Roots. Other times as in The Marva Collins Story (1981), she...injected spirit into what was essentially a formula film.... It became distressing to see her cast in meaningless supporting roles in disappointing projects: Acceptable Risks (1986) and Intimate Encounters (1986). Still even here it was interesting and oddly compelling to watch her struggling to invest such material with some intelligence and dramatic flair. She remained a major American dramatic actress for whom the film and then television industries rarely provided the kind of support system (and acting plums) accorded such white stars as Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep." Tyson described her dilemma to the Bergen County Record: "I'm a woman, and I'm black. I wait for roles--first, to be written for a woman, then, to be written for a black woman. And then," she added, "I have the audacity to be selective about the kinds of roles I play. I've really got three strikes against me. So, aren't you amazed I'm still here?"
Continued Acting and Supporting the Arts
Even when a lack of good roles limited her work before the camera, Tyson continued to work diligently on behalf of the arts in the black community, devoting at least one month out of each year to touring colleges on speaking engagements, an activity that once prompted her to comment to an Ebony interviewer: "I'm appalled at the lethargy and the lack of incentive and motivation among the youth.... I feel there's a great need, especially for the youth, for positive images." One of her most significant contributions to black culture in America was the founding of the Dance Theater of Harlem, which she accomplished in cooperation with Arthur Mitchell. This organization recruits its members from local public schools, provides classical dance training, and gives students the opportunity to perform at national venues. For all her efforts, Tyson became a respected role model for youth. In honor of her dedication to her craft and to others, her name has graced a magnet school in East Orange, New Jersey, the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts, since 1995.
The 1990s and 2000s found Tyson back on the large and small screens in several highly acclaimed projects. She wowed critics and fans alike with her stunning portrayals of strong black women in the motion pictures Fried Green Tomatoes, Hoodlum, and Because of Winn-Dixie, and the television miniseries Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, for which she won another Emmy. As with the early years of her career, Tyson found more television than film work, and appeared in such television features as Sweet Justice, in which she played a gutsy southern lawyer; Road to Galveston, in which she portrayed a fictionalized story of a woman who realizes her dreams after being widowed; A Lesson Before Dying, in which she portrayed the aunt of a man sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit; and The Rosa Parks Story, in which she played Parks' strong, supportive mother.
Despite her many successes, Tyson refused to rest on her laurels. "I think of myself as a work-in-progress to this day," Tyson told the Bergen County Record. Well into her seventies, she continued to seek out interesting and challenging roles. Her reasoning, as she described to the Bergen County Record, was attributable to her belief that "the day I ever feel I have attained greatness I will be finished. It means I have in fact stopped myself from developing."
Tyson's personal life is marked by the same type of discipline that typifies her acting. She is dedicated to physical fitness and eats a strict vegetarian diet with no caffeine or alcohol. She was married to jazz musician Miles Davis for a time; rumors have also circulated for years that she has two children, but the actress herself has refused to confirm or deny them. On the whole, she has been unusually successful in keeping the details of her life private and in forcing the public to judge her solely on the value of her work. And her body of work has won her a place among the most important black performers of the twentieth century. The Houston Chronicle describes Tyson as "like a chicken fried steak smothered in cream gravy. She's Southern comfort food--familiar, delicious, searing, satisfying. Her performances always hit the spot," adding that "She holds the patent for portraying struggling black women who make successes of themselves." As Ms. concluded, "She has an image that spans not only race, but the ideological differences among blacks themselves."
Awards
Vernon Rice Award, 1962, for The Blacks; Vernon Rice Award, 1963, for Moon on a Rainbow Shawl; Academy Award nomination for best actress, Atlanta Film Festival Award for best actress, and National Society of Film Critics Award for best actress, all 1972, all for Sounder; Emmy Awards for best actress in a television special, and best actress of the year, 1974, for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; Emmy Award, for outstanding supporting actress in a miniseries or a special, 1994, for Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All; Ellis Island Family Heritage Award for performance, 2003; also recipient of awards from NAACP, National Council of Negro Women, and National Federation of Black Women Business Owners in Washington. Name graces, Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts, East Orange, NJ, 1995-.
Works
Selected works
- Twelve Angry Men, 1957.
- Odds Against Tomorrow, 1959.
- A Man Called Adam, 1966.
- The Comedians, 1967.
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1968.
- Sounder, 1972.
- The Blue Bird, 1976.
- The River Niger, 1976.
- Fried Green Tomatoes, 1991.
- Hoodlum, 1997.
- Because of Winn-Dixie, 2005.
- Diary of a Mad Black Woman, 2005.
- The Dark of the Moon, 1959.
- Talent '59, 1959.
- The Blacks, 1961.
- Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, 1962.
- Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, 1962.
- The Blue Boy in Black, 1963.
- Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, 1968.
- East Side/West Side, 1963.
- The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1974.
- Just an Old Sweet Song, 1976.
- Roots, 1977.
- Wilma, 1977.
- A Woman Called Moses, 1978.
- King, 1978.
- The Marva Collins Story, 1981.
- Acceptable Risks, 1986.
- Intimate Encounters, 1986.
- The Women of Brewster Place, 1989.
- Duplicates, 1992.
- House of Secrets, 1993.
- Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, 1994.
- Sweet Justice, 1994.
- Road to Galveston, 1996.
- Bridge of Time, 1997.
- Riot, 1997.
- The Price of Heaven, 1997.
- Ms. Scrooge, 1997.
- Always Outnumbered, 1998.
- Mama Flora's Family, 1998.
- A Lesson Before Dying, 1999.
- Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, 1999.
- Jewel, 2001.
- The Rosa Parks Story, 2002.
Further Reading
Books
- Bogle, Donald, Blacks in American Film and Television, Garland, 1988, pp. 472-473.
- Notable Women in the American Theater, Greenwood, 1989.
- Ebony, May 1974; February 1981, pp. 124-132.
- Houston Chronicle, January 24, 1996.
- Interview, September 1997, p. 102.
- Jet, October 28, 1985, pp. 60-62; December 19, 1994, p. 8.
- Ms., August 1974.
- New York, March 23, 1992, p. 62.
- New Yorker, January 28, 1974.
- New York Times, October 1, 1972; October 15, 1972.
- People, May 31, 1999.
- Record (Bergen County, NJ), August 27, 1997; March 11, 1998.
- Time, October 9, 1972, p. 58.
- Variety, March 23, 1992, p. 35.
— Joan Goldsworthy and Sara Pendergast
