Cicely Tyson Wants You to Keep Going
An interview with the 96-year-old legendary actress about her new book
In her forward to Cicely Tyson’s memoir, Just As I Am, Viola Davis writes, “She is not just the performer who has so deftly captured the breadth of the human experience, with all of its unslicked edges. She is Cicely the woman, someone who has grappled with the fears and fragilities many of us carry.” How else can one encapsulate all that Tyson holds in her tiny yet formidable frame?
For eight decades, Cicely Tyson has captured our hearts and our dreams whether on the small screen in Roots or How to Get Away With Murder, the silver screen in The Help or Sounder, or the theatre in The Trip to Bountiful and The Gin Game. Now she can add author to her multi-hyphenate identity.
In Just As I Am, Tyson writes about her humble beginnings in Harlem with her West Indian parents, the adolescent pitfalls, the false starts, the acting and theatre intrigue, as well as her love life, particularly with the late great Miles Davis. There is wisdom, reflection, and, most of all, a softness to her prose that is a gift of a record from one of your most storied Black actresses.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
