Cicely Tyson, award-winning actress and former fashion model, has died. She was 96 years old.
Her death was announced by her manager, Larry Thompson.
“With heavy heart, the family of Miss Cicely Tyson announces her peaceful transition this afternoon. At this time, please allow the family their privacy,” read a statement issued through Thompson, according to The Associated Press.
This week her latest book, “Just As I Am: A Memoir,” was published. It includes a forward by actress Viola Davis, who wrote of Tyson’s memorable work, “Every one of these characters has left me with an emotional, spiritual, and psychological inheritance I will forever carry with me.”
On Twitter Jan. 23, Tyson thanked fellow actress Lupita Nyong’o for sharing kind words about her. “Without the gains of women like her, women like me would have much greater pains to bear in the arts,” Nyong’o wrote in December.
Tributes poured in on social media following Tyson’s death.
“She was an extraordinary person. And this is an extraordinary loss,” tweeted showrunner Shonda Rhimes, whose ABC series, “How to Get Away With Murder,” led to an Emmy-nominated role for Tyson last year. “She had so much to teach. And I still have so much to learn. I am grateful for every moment. Her power and grace will be with us forever.”
“To have gotten to be in the same room as you multiple times, is truly to have been in the presence of GREATNESS!!” tweeted actress Laverne Cox on Thursday night. “There are no words, just all the feelings you’ve evoked in us all and the indescribable blueprint, legacy you leave for us all. Thank you REST IN POWER!”
Vanessa Williams, who performed alongside Tyson in “A Trip to Bountiful,” tweeted simply, “I’m gutted,” alongside a broken heart emoji. Actress Vivica A. Fox remembered introducing her at an event and said she “was moved to tears to be in the presence of TRUE GREATNESS! Thank you QUEEN for your gifts and you will NEVER be forgotten.”
“Star Trek” actor George Takei saluted her “pioneering” film work, noting that her career was “a remarkable feat for an African American woman born 96 years ago.”
And “Pose” star Sandra Bernhard, who said she named her own daughter after Tyson, lauded her as “a woman of immense dignity, grace, incredible talent. a life packed with layers of greatness.”
Away from Hollywood, Rep. Maxine Waters saluted Tyson as “one of the most profound, talented, & celebrated actors in the industry. She was a serious actor, beautiful & spiritual woman who had unlocked the key to longevity in the way she lived her life. Forever all my love & respect.”
Born in the Big Apple in December 1924, Tyson was discovered by a photographer for Ebony magazine and landed her first role on NBC’s “Frontiers of Faith” in 1951.
It was Tyson’s own faith that would carry her through her career, especially when she discovered that her mother wasn’t too keen on her becoming an actress.
“[My] mother … gave me the impetus, telling me it was something that she felt I shouldn’t be doing in light of the fact there were three of us (my brother, myself, and my sister), were reared in the church,” Tyson recalled to NBC News in April 2018. “We were not permitted to go to the movies or the theater. I didn’t even know what a theatre was. My sister and myself were quite dedicated to the church. I sang in the choir, I played the organ, I taught Sunday school. [My mother] was not very happy and asked me to leave her home, which I did.”
It ended up being a sound move.
Tyson was a critical darling from early in her career. One of her first plays, “The Blacks: A Clown Show,” in which she co-starred with James Earl Jones and Maya Angelou, was a massive success in 1961.
In 1962, Tyson joined the cast of “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl,” for which she was awarded a Drama Desk Award.
The pioneering actress played a sharecropper’s wife in 1972’s “Sounder,” a role that landed her a 1973 Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
Just over 50 years later, she took home a Tony Award and a second Drama Desk Award for her starring role in “The Trip to Bountiful,” for which she also earned Emmy and SAG Award nominations for the television adaptation. She also won two Emmy Awards for playing a 110-year-old former slave in the 1974 drama “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”
In 2015 she returned to Broadway for a role opposite James Earl Jones in “The Gin Game,” with The Post’s reviewer calling their performances “so charming and cuddly-wuddly.”
Tyson told The Post’s Cindy Adams she was buoyed by performing theater. “Doing all those performances a week stimulates me,” she said at the time. “I still want to run from theater to theater. The work itself gets me going.”
Other accolades include multiple NAACP Image Awards, a Critics’ Choice Award and a SAG Award. In 2018 she was among the Governors Awards honorees from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Besides her acting career, Tyson also had a modeling stint after attending school at the Barbara Watson Models agency. “I was just tapped on the shoulder, and someone said, ‘You look like you can be a model,’” she told Page Six in 2018. “I did not know what that was, so I said, ‘How do you do that?’ . . . They explained to me that they have schools that you can go to study.”
While Tyson’s professional life was booming, her personal life was always relatively quiet. After appearing on the cover of his “Sorcerer” album in 1967, Tyson eventually married jazz legend Miles Davis in 1981 before they divorced in 1988.
She had no children herself but was a godmother — sharing duties with Oprah Winfrey — to actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry’s son Aman, 6.
Tyson’s mother eventually warmed up to the actress’ career once her stardom became undeniable.
“I’m grateful to say that she lived long enough to see that I was not going to into a house of iniquity, because that’s what she thought of the business and that I was not going to disgrace her and family,” Tyson told NBC News. “I’m pleased that she was finally able to accept what I did and I heard her say, ‘I am so proud of you’ before she passed away. Because I don’t think any of it would have meant anything to me if she had not been able to be part of it all as much as she could while it was happening.”