Cicely Tyson
Birth : 1924-12-19, New York City, New York, USA
Death : 2021-01-28
History
Cicely Louise Tyson was an American actress. In a career which spanned more than seven decades in film, television and theatre, she became known for her portrayal of strong African-American women. She received various awards including three Emmy Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Tony Award, an Honorary Academy Award, and a Peabody Award.
She was discovered by a fashion editor at Ebony magazine and, with her stunning looks, she quickly rose to the top of the modeling industry. In 1957, she began acting in Off-Broadway productions. She had small roles in feature films before she was cast as Portia in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968). Four years later, Cicely was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her sensational performance in the critically acclaimed film Sounder (1972). In 1974, she went on to portray a 110-year-old former slave in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), which earned her two Emmy Awards. She also appeared in the television miniseries Roots (1977), King (1978) and A Woman Called Moses (1978). While Cicely has not appeared steadily onscreen because of her loyalty to only portray strong, positive images of Black women, she is without a doubt one of the most talented, beautiful actresses to have ever graced the stage and screen.
Self (archival footage)
Tells the inspiring story of how six iconic African American female entertainers – Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier – challenged an entertainment industry deeply complicit in perpetuating racist stereotypes, and transformed themselves and their audiences in the process.
Alice
When a law-abiding woman gets indicted for murdering her husband, her lawyer soon realizes that a larger conspiracy may be at work.
Self
A visionary, innovator, and originator who defied categorization and embodied the word cool—a foray into the life and career of musical and cultural icon Miles Davis.
Mrs. Hightower
Thirty years after serving together in the Vietnam War, Larry "Doc" Shepherd, Sal Nealon and the Rev. Richard Mueller reunite for a different type of mission: to bury Doc's son, a young Marine killed in Iraq. Forgoing burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Doc and his old buddies take the casket on a bittersweet trip up the coast to New Hampshire. Along the way, the three men find themselves reminiscing and coming to terms with the shared memories of a war that continues to shape their lives.
Herself
A celebration of Dr. Maya Angelou by weaving her words with rare and intimate archival photographs and videos, which paint hidden moments of her exuberant life during some of America’s most defining civil rights moments. From her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her swinging soirees with Malcolm X in Ghana to her inaugural speech for President Bill Clinton, we are given special access to interviews with Dr. Angelou whose indelible charm and quick wit make it easy to love her.
Hattie
Set in the year 1977, two women look to integrate their small town, inspired by the miniseries "Roots" as it hits the airwaves.
Mrs. Watts
Carrie Watts begrudgingly lives with her busy, overprotective son, Ludie and pretentious daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae. No longer able to drive and forbidden to travel alone, she wishes for freedom from the confines of the house.
Self (archive footage)
The story of the gold-plated statuette that became the film industry's most coveted prize, AND THE OSCAR GOES TO... traces the history of the Academy itself, which began in 1927 when Louis B. Mayer, then head of MGM, led other prominent members of the industry in forming this professional honorary organization. Two years later the Academy began bestowing awards, which were nicknamed "Oscar," and quickly came to represent the pinnacle of cinematic achievement.
Mama Kay
A young family moves into a historic home in Georgia, only to learn they are not the house's only inhabitants. Soon they find themselves in the presence of a secret rising from underground and threatening to bring down anyone in its path.
Nana Mama
After Washington DC detective Alex Cross is told that a family member has been murdered, he vows to track down the killer. He soon discovers that she was not his first victim and that things are not what they seem.
Constantine Jefferson
Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.
Ola
Four couples reunite for their annual vacation in order to socialize and to spend time analyzing their marriages. Their intimate week in the Bahamas is disrupted by the arrival of an ex-husband determined to win back his recently remarried wife.
Pearl
After the death of his father, a former football star reunites with the family that he abandoned years earlier.
Mother Hopkins
A musical set in the Prohibition-era American South, where a speakeasy performer and club manager Rooster must contend with gangsters who have their eyes on the club while his piano player and partner Percival must choose between his love, Angel or his obligations to his father.
Celine
The Irish-willed eighty-year-old Bonnie Ash Fitzpatrick and her only friend in life, seventy-year-old Celine Snow disagree on just about everything. When Bonnie's long-lost niece, Christine, attempts to trick her out of her house, the two friends come up with a plan. Using Bonnie's association with the wacko neighbors (Fat Rose & Squeaky) as examples of her inability to safely care for herself, Christine's plan appears to be working. The friendship between Bonnie and Celine proves to be a greater challenge to Christine than her aunt's age.
Myrtle
Based upon Tyler Perry's acclaimed stage production, Madea's Family Reunion continues the adventures of Southern matriarch Madea. She has just been court ordered to be in charge of Nikki, a rebellious runaway, her nieces, Lisa and Vanessa, are suffering relationship trouble, and through it all, she has to organize her family reunion.
Myrtle
Charles, an attorney, and Helen, his devoted wife, seemed to have everything – money, a beautiful mansion – the American Dream. However, as Helen prepares to celebrate their 18th wedding anniversary, her life takes an unexpected twist when she comes home to find her clothes packed up in a U-Haul van parked in the driveway. Charles is divorcing her and kicks her out. Helen moves in with her grandmother Madea, an old woman who doesn't take any lip from anyone. Madea helps Helen through these tough times by showing her what is really important in life. Helen is forced to rediscover love, life and religion on her pursuit for happiness.
Gloria Dump
A girl, abandoned by her mother when she was three, moves to a small town in Florida with her father. There, she adopts an orphaned dog she names Winn-Dixie. The bond between the girl and her special companion brings together the people in a small Florida town and heals her own troubled relationship with her father.
Leona Edwards McCauley
A seamstress recalls events leading to her act of peaceful defiance that prompted the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.
Cathedral
In the 1940s a 40-year-old woman with five healthy children gives birth to a girl with Down's syndrome.
Tante Lou
In the 1940s South, an African-American man is wrongly accused of the killing a a white store owner. In his defense, his white attorney equates him with a lowly hog, to indicate that he didn't have the sense to know what he was doing. Nevertheless convicted, he is sentenced to die, but his godmother and the aunt of the local schoolteacher convince school teacher go to the convicted man's cell each day to try to reaffirm to him that he is not an animal but a man with dignity.
Luvia
An ex-con moves to L.A. to find work and creates a disturbance by fighting for a position. More importantly he touches the lives of many of his neighbors including an older man dying of cancer, a young married couple whose husband is too proud to accept a lesser position which causes strife with his wife, and a young boy on the verge of getting in trouble with street gangs.
Ms. Ebenita Scrooge
Television movie updating Charles Dickens' story, "A Christmas Carol." Businesswoman Ebenita Scrooge treats her employees and customers poorly. She has no time for Christmas or the holiday spirit. On Christmas Eve, she is visited by the ghost of her dead partner Maude Marley and then by other spirits who remind her of her happy past and chronicle the bitterness and greed that have taken over her life. At last, she is shown her own death and funeral. No one is there to mourn her. This revelation shocks her into opening her heart and her checkbook.
Stephanie St. Clair
In 1934, the second most lucrative business in New York City was running 'the numbers'. When Madam Queen—the powerful woman who runs the scam in Harlem—is arrested, Ellsworth 'Bumpy' Johnson takes over the business and must resist an invasion from a merciless mobster.
Vesta Lotte Battle
Convinced that he's entitled to a life of fame and fortune, Korean War vet Jerry Shand (Grant Show) returns home to his fiancee (Lori Loughlin) and pursues a lucrative --if unprincipled -- insurance career. But when he meets the elderly client Vesta (Cicely Tyson), she begins to shed light on the destructive path Jerry has chosen to travel. Peter Bogdanovich directs this film set against the backdrop of racial tensions in the American South.
Jordan Roosevelt, at 65, found herself alone, destitute, and depressed. Up against the wall, she took heart from the suggestion of a friend, a blind woman who was a nurse: enter a foster care program in which one takes care of patients in their own home. The patients she cares for are Alzheimers sufferers, and she shares her home with three other women in advanced stages of the disease, one (Gayle) wheelchair bound. And with these women, Jordan realizes a lifelong dream - to feel the ocean breeze. An accidental find of a coffee can stash of cash, buried by her late husband, makes the trip possible. Based on the true story of Peggy Lee of Camilla, Texas (the Alzheimers, the patients, and the foster care program are actual, the trip to the Galveston beaches is fictional).
Castralia
Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper.
Evangeline
Marion Ravinel is trapped in an abusive spousal relationship. She forms a plan with her husband's former lover to kill him. However, the outcome turns out to be more than she planned on as she begins to believe that her husband has come back from the dead to get her.
Dr. Randolph
A family falls victim to a scientific institute that removes memories and transfers them to a computer.
Sipsey
Amidst her own personality crisis, southern housewife Evelyn Couch meets Ninny, an outgoing old woman who tells her the story of Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison, two young women who experienced hardships and love in Whistle Stop, Alabama in the 1920s.
Etta Mercer
In this sentimental holiday tale, a young boy is taken away from his loving, adoptive household when his new mom is killed in an auto accident and his traveling musician dad is deemed unfit to care for him, being on the road too much. Now, the only thing that can help is if a cold, bureaucratic adoption agency caseworker sees the error of her ways and allows them to be together.
Ruthana Richardson
A rookie black journalist investigates the tensions of the Watts section of Los Angeles in the bloody summer of 1965.
Mrs. Browne
A multigenerational story of the lives of several black women who call an inner-city tenement home.
A multigenerational story of the lives of several black women who call an inner-city tenement home.
Dr. Claire Dalton
It started as fantasy...and ended as intimate encounters.
Muriel
The manager of a chemical plant and a city manager rise up against their respective bosses to keep a town safe in this ecologically conscientious made-for-TV disaster film. It all begins when the owners of Citichem order the plant manager to enact dangerous cost cuts that compromise the safety of the plant. He protests, but it is to no avail and a worker dies. At the same time, the city manager tries to warn the people that a deadly disaster is imminent, but he ends up gagged by the local politicians. Meanwhile, just when the community is at its most unprepared, a melt-down occurs and the town is drenched in deadly chemicals.
Carol Phillips
Gary Coleman stars as a teenage arsonist. The authorities, friends, and neighbors warn his absentee parents until it is too late.
Odessa
Time begins to catches up to a tough factory worker who is feeling threatened by younger men at work and at play.
Self
The most glittering, expensive, and exhausting videotaping session in television history took place Friday February 19, 1982 at New York's Radio City Music Hall. The event, for which ticket-buyers payed up to $1,000 a seat (tax-deductible as a contribution to the Actors' Fund) was billed as "The Night of 100 Stars" but, actually, around 230 stars took part. And most of the audience of 5,800 had no idea in advance that they were paying to see a TV taping, complete with long waits for set and costume changes, tape rewinding, and the like. Executive producer Alexander Cohen estimated that the 5,800 Radio City Music Hall seats sold out at prices ranging from $25 to $1,000. The show itself cost about $4 million to produce and was expected to yield around $2 million for the new addition to the Actors Fund retirement home in Englewood, N. J. ABC is reputed to have paid more than $5 million for the television rights.
Marva Collins
Cicely Tyson was Emmy-nominated as Outstanding Actress for her portrait of a Chicago schoolteacher whose remarkable achievements with black children labelled "unteachable" were spotlighted in a 1979 "60 Minutes" segment about how she became disillusioned with the traditional school system and decided to work outside of it, transforming her students into young scholars through her unique teaching style.
Vivian Perry
After ex-con Joe Braxton violates his probation he is given a second chance, all he has to do is drive a group of special kids across the country.
Elaine
Aviation disaster-prone Joe Patroni must contend with nuclear missiles, the French Air Force and the threat of the plane splitting in two over the Alps.
Sweets
A troubled boy becomes addicted to heroin, and his mother and foster father help him fight it.
Blanche Rudolph
The story of American track sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who overcame physical handicaps to win three gold medals in the 1960 Olympics.
Priscilla Simmons
Upon learning that their grandmother is not long for this world, Nate and Priscilla Simmons pack up their kids and leave Detroit to head down South. Eventually, the family rediscovers its African-American roots and elects to stay in their new rural surroundings.
Mattie Williams
An intimate look at life in the ghetto: Johnny Williams is a house painter who moonlights as a poet, struggling to financially and emotionally support his cancer-ridden wife Mattie. But times are tough and the poverty-troubled streets are even tougher, and it takes every ounce of Johnny's love and courage for the couple to make it through their strife, finding redemption in the River Niger.
Tylette
A pair of peasant children, Mytyl and her brother Tyltyl, are led on a magical quest for the fabulous Blue Bird of Happiness by the Fairy Berylune. On their journey, they are accompanied by the humanized presences of a Dog, a Cat, Light, Fire, Bread, and other entities.
Self
Free to Be…You and Me, a project of the Ms. Foundation for Women, is a record album, and illustrated book first released in November 1972, featuring songs and stories from many current celebrities of the day (credited as "Marlo Thomas and Friends") such as Alan Alda, Rosey Grier, Cicely Tyson, Carol Channing, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross, among others. An ABC Afterschool Special using poetry, songs, and sketches, followed two years later in March 1974. The basic concept is to encourage a post-60's gender neutrality, while saluting values such as individuality, tolerance, and happiness with one's identity. A major thematic message is that anyone, whether a boy or a girl, can achieve anything.
Jane Pittman
In February, 1962, as the civil rights movement reaches Bayonne, Louisiana, a New York journalist arrives to interview Jane Pittman, who has just turned 110. She tells him her story dating back to her earliest memories before slavery ended. In between the chapters of her life, the present-day struggles of Blacks in Bayonne, urged on by Jimmy, are dramatized.
Rebecca Morgan
The Morgans, a loving and strong family of Black sharecroppers in Louisiana in 1933, face a serious family crisis when the husband and father, Nathan Lee Morgan, is convicted of a petty crime and sent to a prison camp. After some weeks or months, the wife and mother, Rebecca Morgan, sends the oldest son, who is about 11 years old, to visit his father at the camp. The trip becomes something of an odyssey for the boy. During the journey he stays a little while with a dedicated Black schoolteacher.
Racial tensions come out of the woodwork when an upper-class white couple puts their suburban home on the market and the listing draws a pair of equally well-to-do African American buyers from Harlem. Fielder Cook directs this Broadway staging of playwright Arkady Leokum's exploration of lingering racial prejudice in 1970s America.
Emma Teasley
A medical student marries a millionaire's daughter but insists they live on the money he earns.
Excerpts from the 1969 Off-Broadway production at the Cherry Lane Theater of To Be Young, Gifted and Black: The World of Lorraine Hansberry, adapted by Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry's widower, and directed by Gene Frankel.
Portia Copeland
Singer is a deaf-mute whose small world brings him in contact with a young girl, Mick, who cherishes a seemingly hopeless dream of becoming a concert pianist. At first hostile, Mick soon becomes friends with Singer, hoping to enlarge his small world. Three other central characters come to Singer for help also, each of them seeing in him a powerful force.
Marie Therese
American and British tourists get caught up in political unrest in Haiti.
Claudia Ferguson
A famous jazz trumpeter finds himself unable to cope with the problems of everyday life.
Girl Left on Porch (uncredited)
Dr. Sam Abelman is a Jewish doctor contentedly spending his autumn years serving his own Brooklyn neighborhood. But when his nephew, would-be journalist Myron, writes an article about him, it draws the attention of a producer, Woodrow Thrasher, who believes Dr. Abelman a good candidate for a TV show. The doctor, however, is suspicious of the whole enterprise, thinking both Myron and Thrasher are simply out to make a fast buck.
Jazz Club Bartender (uncredited)
An old-time crook plans a heist. When one of his two partners is found out to be a black man tensions flare.
Dottie
The hard-working but struggling crew of a shrimp boat discover a sunken treasure. Trouble ensues in this dramatic black-cast production.
Narrator
The story of racism, segregation and Civil Rights in America told through the lives of the Negro League baseball players. Features exclusive interviews with the men who played alongside of Jackie Robinson.
