About Cicely Tyson
(Image from IMDb)
Cicely Tyson was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, and won Best Actress awards from the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, for her performance as Rebecca Morgan in Sounder (1972). She has won three Primetime Emmys, and is celebrated for her moving performances in classics of the stage and the big and small screens, including Roots, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. She played a civil-rights activist in the mid-1990s television series Sweet Justice and co-starred in Diary of a Mad Black Woman. In 2013, she won a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for her Broadway performance in A Trip to Bountiful. (Visions and Voices)
Films Featuring Cicely Tyson
Check out the Leavey Library DVD collection for additional works featuring Cicely Tyson.
The Trip to BountifulPublication Date: 2014Carrie 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 and begs her son to take her on a visit to her hometown of Bountiful. When he refuses, Mrs. Watts is undeterred and makes an escape to the local bus station, where she befriends Thelma, a young woman traveling home.
RootsPublication Date: Originally released in 1977Follows several generations in the lives of a slave family. The saga begins with Kunta Kinte, a West African youth captured by slave raiders and shipped to America in the 1700s. The family is depicted up until the Civil War, when Kunte Kinte's grandson gains his emancipation.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane PittmanPublication Date: Originally produced as a television movie in 1973The history of blacks in the South as seen through the eyes of a 110-year-old former slave. Based on the novel by Ernest J. Gaines.
Fried Green TomatoesPublication Date: Originally produced in 1991A chance encounter in a nursing home leads to an unexpected friendship between a dowdy housewife and a spry octagenarian who tells her the story of a fiercely independent woman half a century ago, inspiring the housewife to change her life, often with hilarious results.
The HelpPublication Date: 2011In 1960s Mississippi, Skeeter, a southern society girl, returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her friends' lives, and a small Mississippi town, upside down when she decides to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern families. Aibileen, Skeeter's best friend's housekeeper, is the first to open up, to the dismay of her friends in the tight-knit black community.
Because of Winn-DixiePublication Date: 2005The heartwarming 'tail' of a young girl whose life is changed by a scruffy, fun-loving pooch she names Winn-Dixie. The special bond between them works magic on her reserved dad and the eccentric townspeople they meet during one unforgettable summer.
SounderPublication Date: Originally released in 1972A sharecropper's wife keeps the family together after he goes to prison in 1930s Louisiana.