Actress Cicely Tyson

I don't think I can do justice to Cicely Tyson, one of the greatest black actresses of the past century and one of the greatest actresses period of the past century, on this blog.  It would be next to impossible to sum up her acting career - she's done too much! :-D    

But that's a good thing.  Anyway, her best known roles in fact define her long and distinguished career, most notably as Rebecca Morgan in 1972's Sounder.  Rebecca is the matriarch of a sharecropping family in 1933 Louisiana who struggles to help keep her family together in hard times.  Other cinema parts include her portrayal of the café cook Sipsey in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and as Constantine in the notoriously honest movie about Southern racism against black domestic workers in The Help (2011).

She's also well-known for two TV movie roles - the title character of 1974's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, about a former slave who lives a long, long life, and A Woman Called Moses, the 1978 TV movie about Harriet Tubman - Ms. Tyson played the the tile role, of course.

Ms. Tyson also won a Tony Award for playing Carrie Watts in the 2013 Broadway production of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful, and she's played several one-shot roles in many a TV series.  As recently as 2015, she stared with James Earl Jones in a production of The Gin Game, a play about two elderly people who meet in a nursing home and begin playing gin rummy together.

At the age of 94 as of this writing, Cicely Tyson is an American institution, having been awarded a Kennedy Center honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Fun fact 1: She was married to jazz musician Miles Davis for eight years beginning in 1981.

Fun fact 2: Her parents were immigrants from Nevis, whose most famous native son is Alexander Hamilton.