Cicely Tyson blazed a trail on stage
and screen by demanding that African-
Americans be portrayed with dig-
nity. After playing prostitutes in two
acclaimed off- Broadway plays in the early 1960s,
Tyson decided she would never again take a job in
which she was cast as a stereotypical black hooker,
maid, or addict. Her insistence that a character
possess strength, grace, and depth meant Tyson
sometimes went years without work, even following
her Oscar-nominated performance as a Louisiana
sharecropper’s wife in 1972’s Sounder. Yet her uncom-
promising selectivity paid off, and Tyson delivered a
string of electrifying portrayals of resilient black women—both real
and fictional—in a seven- decade career. She was a former slave in
the 1974 CBS special The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,
Kunta Kinte’s mother in the blockbuster 1977 TV miniseries Roots,
and civil rights activist Coretta Scott King in the 1978 TV biopic
King. “It amuses me when people say, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve done so
much,’” she said of her work. “It isn’t that I’ve done so much. It’s
that what I have done has made a real impact.”Tyson was born in Harlem “to West Indian immigrants who
scraped by in menial jobs,” said The Washington Post. Her parents
divorced when Tyson was 11, and she was raised by her “deeply
religious” mother. After graduating from high school, the regal and
willowy Tyson was set up with a modeling gig by her hairdresser,
which led to appearances in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Ebony.
She studied at the Actors Studio and landed small parts on TV; her
disapproving mother—who considered show business “sinful”—stopped talking to her for two years. In 1961, she
appeared in a hit off- Broadway production of Jean
Genet’s anti-colonial play The Blacks, and two years
later was cast as a secretary in East Side, West Side,
a CBS show about social workers. The show was
short-lived, but it allowed her to make her mark: as
the first black actress with a continuing role in a dra-
matic series, “and as the trend setter for her natural,
unstraightened hairstyle.” Ebony would later hail
Tyson as the “mother of the Afro.”
In 1972, Tyson finally landed “a leading role with
dignity,” said The New York Times. Her powerful,
understated performance in Sounder—as a woman
who holds her family together amid the Great Depression—won
rave reviews and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. For 1974’s
acclaimed Jane Pittman, she transformed into a 110-year-old ex-
slave who lives to see the civil rights movement. In private, Tyson
“was fiercely disciplined,” said The Daily Telegraph. A teetotaling
vegetarian, she married Miles Davis in 1981 and helped the jazz leg-
end overcome his drug and alcohol addictions. But the trumpeter’s
repeat infidelities led to violent rows, one in which he admitted he
punched her, and the couple divorced in 1988.
“In later life, Tyson continued to choose her projects carefully,” said
The Times (U.K.). She won her third Emmy in 1994 for the minise-
ries Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, had recurring parts
in the TV dramas How to Get Away With Murder and House of
Cards, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony Award,
for 2013’s The Trip to Bountiful. Retirement was never an option.
God, she said, would take her when she had “completed my job.”Cloris Leachman defied typecasting
throughout her eight- decade career.
She won an Oscar for her portrayal
of a lonely rural Texas housewife in
1971’s The Last Picture Show—then had one of her
most memorable roles in Mel Brooks’ madcap Young
Frankenstein, playing the forbidding Frau Blücher,
a Transylvanian housekeeper so sinister that each
mention of her name sets horses to whinnying. But
Leachman made her biggest mark in the 1970s as
Phyllis Lindstrom, Mary Richards’ overbearing, self-
centered landlady on TV’s The Mary Tyler Moore
Show. Her performance was such a hit, it launched
a spinoff, Phyllis, which ran on CBS from 1975 to 1977. With
recurring roles on other shows, including The Facts of Life, Raising
Hope, Mad About You, and Malcolm in the Middle—in which
she played Malcolm’s tyrannical, chain- smoking grandmother—
Leachman drew 22 Emmy nominations and eight wins, a number
equaled only by Seinfeld and Veep star Julia Louis- Dreyfus. Through
it all she was guided by one credo. “Since my childhood I have dis-
liked rules,” she said, “and for the most part have avoided them.”
Leachman grew up outside Des Moines “in an isolated house with
no running water,” said the Associated Press. Her father ran a lum-
ber business and her mother was a homemaker with “ambitious
ideas for her children.” She encouraged Leachman’s interest in act-
ing, at one point arranging for her daughter “to ride on a coal truck
to Des Moines” to audition for a student play at Drake University.
After high school, Leachman studied drama at Northwestern Uni-
ver sity, but with little tolerance for schoolwork she “lasted only ayear.” On “a lark,” she entered a beauty pageant and
became Miss Chicago, then a finalist in the 1946 Miss
America pageant, winning $1,000.She used the money to bankroll a move to New
York City, studying at the Actors Studio, said the
Los Angeles Times. In the 1940s and ’50s Leachman
“notched several Broadway credits,” including an
appearance opposite Katharine Hepburn in As You
Like It. She landed her first big-screen role in 1955,
playing a mysterious hitchhiker in the noir thriller Kiss
Me Deadly, and two years later was cast as Timmy’s
mother on TV’s Lassie. Leachman lost that gig in
1958, after she balked at doing promotional work for the show’s
sponsor, Campbell’s Soup. “I make my own soup,” she declared.
Being cast in The Last Picture Show brought her a Best Supporting
Actress Oscar and “changed the trajectory of her career.”She joyfully “embraced unorthodox, aggressively undignified
parts,” said The Washington Post, from an “alcoholic, jazz- singing
mother” in 2004’s Spanglish to a “frisky prison secretary” in Adam
Sandler’s 2005 remake of The Longest Yard. Leachman was also
an “uninhibited interviewee” who swore liberally and spoke read-
ily “about her longtime open marriage to producer- director George
Englund,” with whom she had five children before divorcing in- She “remained in show business almost to the end of her
life,” becoming—at age 82— Dancing With the Stars’ oldest-ever
contestant in 2008, said The New York Times. “Courage is some-
thing not generally associated with acting,” she wrote in her 2009
memoir. “For me, it’s a crucial element.”
Obituaries
Cloris
Leachman
1926–2021Ge
tty
(^2
)
The screen and stage star who shattered racial stereotypes
The prolific actress who shined in dramas and comedies
Cicely
Tyson
1924–202135