Acting Legend and Hollywood Pioneer Cicely Tyson Dead at 96

A three-time Emmy winner and actor's actor who blazed trails and brought gravitas to everything she touched, Cicely Tyson died on January 28. She was 96.

"I have managed Miss Tyson's career for over 40 years, and each year was a privilege and blessing," her manager, Larry Thompson, said in a statement obtained by Variety. "Cicely thought of her new memoir as a Christmas tree decorated with all the ornaments of her personal and professional life. Today she placed the last ornament, a Star, on top of the tree."

The former model's acting career started in 1950 when Tyson made the transition to the stage and a year later, appeared on the NBC series Frontiers of Faith. More TV work would come in the form of 1963's East Side/West Side, making her the first black actor to star in a television drama. But it would be her award-winning turn in the title role for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1974 that would earn her two Emmy wins and inspire a young Viola Davis to become an actress and pick Tyson to co-star as her mother on How to Get Away With Murderdecades later.

Tyson's other early television work includes the daytime soap Guiding Light and the 1977 miniseries Roots. In 1994, Tyson nabbed her third Emmy, this time for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie for her role in the CBS made-for-TV film Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Overall, Tyson was Emmy nominated 13 times over the course of her storied career.

On the film side, she enjoyed roles in 1966's A Man Called Adam with Sammy Davis Jr., a film version of The Comedians in 1967 and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968. Oscar recognition came calling for Tyson as a lead actress in 1972'sSounder. She starred as matriarch Rebecca Morgan in a sharecropping family struggling to survive during the Great Depression but lost to Cabaret star Liza Minnelli. In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized Tyson for her impressive, seven-decades-long career and made her the first black woman to win an honorary Oscar. Her other film roles of note include Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Hoodlum (1997), Idlewild (2006) and Why Did I Get Married Too (2010).

Tyson, who was a SAG Award winner, a Kennedy Center honoree and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, also fared well on and off-Broadway. She appeared in the original cast of The Blacks. The play, which came from French playwright and novelist Jean Genet, was the longest-running off-Broadway non-musical of the 1960s with more than 1400 performances. In 2013, Tyson earned a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her stirring turn as Miss Carrie Watts in The Trip to Bountiful, starring alongside Vanessa L. Williams and Cuba Gooding Jr. Tyson was one Grammy away from becoming an EGOT.

When asked about her dedication to the craft of acting, the Harlem native and second oldest child in her family would often point to her life's biggest influences -- mother, Fredricka Theodosia Tyson, who worked as a domestic and her father, William Tyson, a carpenter. Both hailed from the Caribbean island of Nevis.

Tyson released her memoir, Just As I Am, on Tuesday, January 26, just days before she passed away.