In Cicely Tyson’s groundbreaking role in the 1974 television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—for which she won two Emmys (Actress of the Year and Best Lead Actress in a Drama)—she played a woman who was born into slavery and lived to participate in the civil rights movement in 1962 at the age of 110. Today, the life and career of Tyson, now 92, encompasses a similarly grand arc set against the most recent century of American history.
Since landing her first film role back in 1957, Tyson’s monumental catalog of work has spanned six decades and counting: She’s starred in plays ranging from 1969’s To Be Young, to the 2013 revival of The Trip to Bountiful, for which she won a Tony. Her work on the small screen covers the TV era in full, from 1960s shows such as Naked City and Guiding Light through House of Cards and beyond; she was also nominated for an Emmy for portraying Binta, Kunta Kinte’s mother, in the epochal 1977 miniseries Roots. And on the big screen, Tyson has starred in more than two dozen films, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968); Sounder (1972), for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar; Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), in which she played the story’s secret heroine, Sipsey; several of Tyler Perry’s blockbuster comedies; and the 2011 megahit The Help, in which Tyson costarred with Viola Davis—on whose epic TV series, How to Get Away With Murder, she has also appeared as Davis’s mother.
ELLE invited Davis, herself a legend in the making, to interview Tyson about her life and her award-festooned acting achievements.
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