Cicely Tyson won an Emmy for her masterful performance in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
CICELY TYSON
BAMfilm, BAM Rose Cinemas
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February 4-10
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In her bestselling 2021 memoir, Just as I Am (Harper, $28.99), actress and activist Cicely Tyson writes, “The era I grew up in both deepened my racial wound and soothed it with the healing balm of the arts. My childhood spanned the 1920s and 1930s, two of the most economically memorable and culturally rich decades in American history — a period when Negro literature, music and culture flourished. The Roaring ’20s rollicked joyously with jazz, decadence and illegal whiskey, while the thunderous market crash of 1929 rattled nerves throughout the ’30s. What these shifts meant to daily life, or whether they had any noticeable consequence at all, depended upon where you lived and how much you were able to earn, both of which were inextricably tied to the color of your skin.” She continues, “The United States has never been ‘one nation under God’ but several nations gazing up at him, dissimilar faces huddled beneath a single flag. In white America, the ’20s may have roared, but in my Black world — in what has been called the Other America — the decade also moaned. The fact that the Great Depression was given a name just meant that enough whites were now suffering alongside us to warrant an official title.”
Born in the Bronx in 1924 and raised in Harlem, Tyson set a new standard for class and quality. As a young boy, I was transfixed by her performances in the 1974 television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, for which she won an Emmy; Roots, in which she portrays Binta, the mother of Kunta Kinte, earning her an Emmy nomination; and Sounder, the first film I saw based on a book I had read. (Her role as the matriarch of a southern sharecropper family nabbed her an Oscar nod; she was given an honorary Academy Award in 2018 for her body of work.) In addition, I was fortunate to see her onstage several times, in The Trip to Bountiful in 2013, for which she won the Tony for Best Actress, and The Gin Game with James Earl Jones in 2015. She has also been celebrated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Kennedy Center Honor.
Cicely Tyson earned an Oscar nomination for Sounder
Tyson passed away in January 2021 at the age of ninety-six, and BAM is paying tribute to her February 4-10 with a short retrospective that includes The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which she plays a 110-year-old former slave involved in the civil rights movement; Sounder, one of the all-time-great dog movies; Bustin’ Loose, the 1981 Richard Pryor comedy in which she plays a schoolteacher; the 1956 Key West-set drama Carib Gold, in which she and Geoffrey Holder made their screen debuts; Hoodlum, Bill Duke’s 1997 Harlem crime flick with Laurence Fishburne and Vanessa Williams (Tyson would later appear with Williams in Bountiful); and Bryan Barber’s 2006 musical Idlewild, costarring Terrence Howard, Ben Vereen, Patti LaBelle, Ving Rhames, Macy Gray, André 3000, and Big Boi.
In 2016, Tyson received the inaugural Sir Sidney Poitier Tribute Award at the Bahamas International Film Festival. (Tyson had appeared on Broadway in 1968 with Louis Gossett Jr. and Diane Ladd in Robert Alan Aurthur’s Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, the only play Poitier ever directed; it lasted only seven performances.) “This award, in recognition of my dear friend and colleague, delights my heart,” she said at the time of the announcement. “Both Sydney and I have always tried to use our career to not only entertain, and enlighten, but to educate as well.” Poitier, who was also class personified, passed away last month at the age of ninety-four, but both their legacies will live on.