Cicely Tyson, the first African American actress to win the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, died aged 96

Cicely Tyson, which in 2018 was awarded an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, is died Thursday night, at the age of ninety-six. “I have been able to manage Cicely’s professional life for forty years, and every year has been a blessing and a privilege”, said, through a press release, the manager of the actress, among whose latest performances a special mention deserves the elderly Ophelia Harkness, mother of Annalize Keating The rules of the perfect crime. The role, as a petite woman struggling daily with senile dementia, earned Tyson five Emmy Award nominations.

Cicely Tyson has not won any statuettes for the Shonda Rhimes TV series. But, over the years, the same years he wanted to tell in a memoir, Just as I am, released last Tuesday, got three, the first two in 1974 with The autobiography of miss Jane Pittman. So, Cicely Tyson made it clear what she was going to do in her career. The actress, discovered by chance at the time when she was working as a secretary for the Red Cross, did not want to compromise in her work. Stubborn, he decided he would represent African Americans through uplifting roles. She wasn’t going to be a prostitute, she wasn’t going to play the part of the drug addict.

And that promise of hers, sealed long before she could know fame, kept her until the end, actress of theater, cinema and television, never of convenience. The memory of Michelle Obama: «It inspired me to walk a little higher».

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