Martin Luther King Jr.'s Legacy Has Endured Onstage for Decades
In 1976, Billy Dee Williams embodied Dr. King on Broadway.
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In 1976, Billy Dee Williams embodied Dr. King on Broadway.
“I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant the decade and a half in the middle of the twentieth century, when Tyson won role after role in well-financed productions in the Hollywood system and made-for-TV films broadcast on the networks. Those were the years people learned her name. In Tyson’s earliest roles—starting with 1956’s Carib Gold, in which she was part of an ensemble that included Diana Sand...
Revisiting Sounder: Cicely Tyson’s first Oscar nod Kristal Brent Zook Entertainment Weekly , explores more than a century of movies and the artists who created them. This excerpt remembers Sounder (1972), a Depression-era tearjerker that earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Screenplay, Actor (Paul Winfield), and Actress (Cicely Tyson). It is one of several great period dramas we included that, spanning eras and a range of Black experiences, tell the truth through fiction. It seems a simple story about a sharecropper family and their dog Sounder. Yet William H. Arms...
(Mario Anzuoni/Reuters) Her new fans use race to deny her artistry and exceptionalism. The late Cicely Tyson is getting the Chadwick Boseman treatment. Mainstream media bow to her memory with overstated obits and one piddling night of two films on Turner Classic Movies. All this, pretending to respect the artistry of her 60-year-plus career, simply in order to make Tyson an exemplar of Black Lives Matter significance. Advertisement Dark, lovely, and clearly intelligent, Tyson was certainly an extraordinary figure during the late 20th century, but like other black American perfor...