The Academy, Tony, and three-time Emmy Award-winning actor and trailblazer, Cicely Tyson, tells her stunning story, looking back at her six-decade career and life.
JUST AS I AM: A Memoir
by Cicely Tyson
HarperCollins, January 2021
“In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only exceeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history.” –President Barack Obama, 2016 Presidential Medal of Honor ceremony
Over the course of her career, Cicely Tyson was nominated for 49 television and film awards and won 42, most notably an Oscar, a Tony Award, 3 Emmys, 8 NAACP Image Awards, the African American Film Critics Special Achievement Award, the BAFTA Film Award, the Black Film Critics Circle Award, 4 Black Reel Awards, the Elle Women in Hollywood Award, the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Award, a Gold Derby Award, the Gracie Allen Award, the Hollywood Film Award, 2 National Board of Review Awards, 3 Lifetime Achievement Awards, and many more. She was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2015 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barak Obama in 2016. Most recently, she was featured on the cover of ELLE Magazine’s November 2017 issue, which went on to become one or their most popular and highest grossing issues. She was also on TIME’s February 2019 issue. When interviewed for TIME Magazine in February 2019, she vowed that she would never retire.
Cicely Tyson broke incredible ground for Black women in Hollywood by becoming one of the top Black models in the 1950s, gracing the covers of Ebony and Jet; the First African-American woman to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Television movie (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1974); the first woman to wear her natural hair on television (East Side/West Side, 1963); the highest paid Black actress in the 1980s; and the first Black woman to host Saturday Night Live. She founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem with Arthur Miller and dutifully supported the Cicely L. Tyson Community School of Performing and Fine Arts in New Jersey.
Miss Tyson passed away on January 28, 2021. She is beloved and will be missed by her family and friends.
