The Illinois family of a vaccinated woman who died of COVID-19 says her death could have been avoided if more people were vaccinated.
Candace Kay Ayers, 66, died September 3 at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Illinois, according to her obituary.
Ayers was fully vaccinated in the spring but she got diagnosed with COVID-19 on July 28, her family told the State Journal-Register.
Candace Ayers (Ayers Family)
Ayers’ family is heartbroken over her death and they wanted to send a message to those who were still hesitant about taking the vaccine.
COVID-19 KILLS AMERICANS AT A RATE OF 1 IN 500, DATA SHOWS
“She was preceded in death by more than 4,531,799 others infected with COVID-19,” her family wrote. “She was vaccinated but was infected by others who chose not to be. The cost was her life.”
Ayers’ 36-year-old son, Marc, confirmed the family’s position in an interview with Fox News.
“We want to hold every segment of the population accountable and responsible for where we’re at today,” he said.
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Marc said he’s gotten messages of support while also receiving plenty of messages filled with hate from those who blame his mother for her own death.
Ayers is survived by her husband, Terry, of nearly 43 years, her children Marc and Amanda as well her five grandchildren.
Willard Scott, the beloved weatherman who charmed viewers of NBC’s “Today” show with his self-deprecating humor and cheerful personality, has died. He was 87.
His successor on the morning news show, Al Roker, announced that Scott died peacefully Saturday morning surrounded by family. An NBC Universal spokeswoman confirmed the news. No further details were released.
“He was truly my second dad and am where I am today because of his generous spirit,” Roker wrote on Instagram. “Willard was a man of his times, the ultimate broadcaster. There will never be anyone quite like him.”
“He played such an outsized role in my life and was as warm and loving and generous off-camera as he was on,” Katie Couric tweeted.
Scott began his 65-year career at NBC as an entry-level page at an affiliate station in Washington, D.C., and rose to become the weather forecaster on the network’s flagship morning show for more than three decades. His trademark was giving on-air birthday greetings to viewers who turned 100 years old by putting their faces on Smucker’s jelly jars and delivering weather updates in zany costumes.
TODAY — Pictured: NBC News’ Willard Scott in April, 1980 — Photo by: NBC/NBC NewsWire
NBC NewsWire
According to NBC, he once took up a viewer’s dare to appear in drag to win a $1,000 donation to the USO, the charity for military families, by dressing up as the Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda. The stunt wasn’t new for the genial Scott: he played Bozo the Clown when he hosted a children’s TV show in the 1960s and Ronald McDonald in commercials in the Washington area.
He often dressed as Santa Claus at the National Tree Lighting ceremony throughout the 1980s and co-anchored NBC’s coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade between 1987 to 1997. In one memorable moment on live television, First Lady Barbara Bush gave him a kiss during the 1989 inauguration parade of her husband, President George H.W. Bush.
“(The president) said, ‘I didn’t know you knew Willard Scott.’ I said, ‘I don’t know Willard Scott. I just love that face,'” the first lady recalled.
Scott handed the reins to Roker in 1996, occasionally filling in for him for the next decade before fully retiring in 2015.
He is survived by his wife, Paris Keena, whom he married in 2014, and two daughters with Mary Dwyer Scott, his wife of 43 years until she died in 2002.
Lee “Scratch” Perry, the Jamaican dub legend, has died, the Jamaica Observer and The Guardian report. Perry was at Noel Holmes Hospital in Lucea, Jamaica when he passed earlier today (August 29). A cause of death has not yet been revealed. He was 85 years old. Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s prime minister, posted a tribute to the iconic musician on Twitter after the news of Perry’s death began to circulate. “My deep condolences to the family, friends, and fans of legendary record producer and singer, Rainford Hugh Perry OD, affectionately known as ‘Lee Scratch‘ Perry.” Holness wrote.
Perry, along with his band the Upsetters, helped spread the music of Jamaica around the world, producing records by groups like the Congos and Bob Marley & the Wailers, and serving as an influence on acts including the Clash and the Beastie Boys. Perry was born in Kendal, Jamaica in 1936. In the ’50s, Perry began working with Clement Coxsone Dodd, selling records and later working at Dodd’s recording studio, Studio One. Using this experience, he started his own label, Upsetter.
He released his innovative first single, “People Funny Boy” through the label, which highlighted his distinctive production technique. His studio experimentations—which included early uses of sampling and remixing—helped lead to the creation of the dub genre, which he solidified at Black Ark Studios—a new space he built in his backyard. After a series of successful albums with his band the Upsetters and countless production credits, Perry’s music was brought to new audiences during the ’80s, when he worked with British producer Adrian Sherwood.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday, Perry told the Guardian, “Music is magic. If you have good music you have good magic. If you have good magic you will be followed by good people.”
Greatly admired by her fellow artists and a devoted army of fans, Nanci Griffith, who has died aged 68, exemplified a style of musical storytelling with a literary flavour, focusing on the small details of the lives of her characters. Songs such as Love at the Five and Dime and Gulf Coast Highway have become permanent fixtures in the folk-country canon (Griffith described her music as “folkabilly”), and the Grammy award she won for her album Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1994 seemed a long overdue reward for her carefully crafted body of work.
While that album comprised versions of other people’s songs, other artists appreciated the quality of her own material. Love at the Five and Dime, from Griffith’s album The Last of the True Believers (1986), was a Grammy-nominated country hit for Kathy Mattea, while Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson sang Gulf Coast Highway on Harris’s hit album Duets (1990). Suzy Bogguss had a country Top 10 hit with Griffith’s Outbound Plane.
A shrewd song-picker, Griffith was the first artist to record Julie Gold’s From a Distance, and it gave her a Top 10 hit in Ireland, though it was Bette Midler who had a huge hit with it in 1990. A less successful covers album, Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful), released in 1998, was accompanied by a book, Nanci Griffith’s Other Voices – A Personal History of Folk Music.
The youngest of three children, Griffith was born in Seguin, Texas, a small town near San Antonio. Her father, Marlin, was a bookseller. He also sang in barbershop quartets and was a fan of traditional folk music who introduced Nanci to the music of the 1960s folk-revivalist Carolyn Hester. His wife, Ruelen (nee Strawser), worked as an estate agent. Her parents moved to Austin during her childhood before divorcing in 1960. Griffith described her family as “really dysfunctional”, and her song Bad Seed, from the album Intersection (2012), was addressed to her father, and included the lines “Bad seed, there’s a darkness I can’t hide … too much pain to keep inside.”
Nanci Griffith on stage in Los Angeles in 1994. Photograph: Sherry Rayn Barnett/Getty Images
She learned to play the guitar by watching a PBS TV series hosted by Laura Weber and started to write her own songs. Her first performance was at the Red Lion club in Austin, when she was 12. She listed the songwriter Odetta as one of her key influences, and defined herself by saying: “You take a whole lot of Woody Guthrie and a whole lot of Loretta Lynn, swoosh it around and it comes out as Nanci Griffith.”
She recalled being strongly affected by seeing her fellow Texan Townes van Zandt perform, singling out his song Tecumseh Valley, the kind of finely drawn narrative that would become a trademark of her own work.
She played in clubs while finishing her academic qualifications, and armed with a degree in education from the University of Texas, she became a kindergarten teacher. In 1978 she released her debut album, There’s a Light Beyond These Woods, on the local Austin label BF Deal. The title song defined some of her essential qualities. It was a haunting and nostalgic saga of two childhood friends pursuing different paths through life, and included a reference to a boy called John, who had been her high school sweetheart but died in a motorcycle accident. Also in 1978 she won the New Folk competition at the Kerrville folk festival.
She made three more albums for the independent labels Featherbed and Philo, the last of them the Grammy-nominated The Last of the True Believers, before moving to Nashville in 1985. Her arrival there coincided with a boom in so-called “New Country” artists, including Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett, though she insisted that she did not belong to that category. She signed a deal with a major label, MCA, for whom she recorded a quartet of albums including Lone Star State of Mind (1987), which reached 23 on the US country chart and gave her a country Top 40 hit with the title track, and Little Love Affairs (1988), which went to 27 on the country chart.
Griffith put together her renowned Blue Moon Orchestra, which would accompany her for more than a decade. The albums Storms (1989) and Late Night Grande Hotel (1991), produced by the rock producer Glyn Johns and Rod Argent and Peter Van Hooke respectively, provoked some criticism from purists for aiming for a more mainstream audience.
In 1993 she moved to the Elektra label where she would enjoy her highest profile successes. Other Voices, Other Rooms (1993) borrowed its title from Truman Capote’s first novel and was a collection of songs by writers who had inspired her, including Guthrie, Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Janis Ian and John Prine, and featured guest appearances by Dylan, Prine, Hester, Emmylou Harris and Iris DeMent.
Further success followed with Flyer (1994), which cracked the Top 50 in the US and reached 20 in the UK, though subsequent releases saw her sales falling away.
Griffith suffered health problems. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996 and thyroid cancer in 1998. A case of Dupuytren’s contracture caused her to lose flexibility in her fingers.
She was married to the Texan singer-songwriter Eric Taylor from 1976 until their divorce in 1982.
Taylor had served in Vietnam, and in 2000 Griffith visited Vietnam and Cambodia with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Vietnam was the subject of several songs on her last Elektra album Clock Without Hands (2001), named after a novel by Carson McCullers.
She recorded four more albums, the last of them being Intersection, recorded at her Nashville home with Pete and Maura Kennedy and the percussionist Pat McInerney. Two of its songs Come On Up Mississippi and Bethlehem Steel reflected some of Griffith’s social and political concerns.
Biz Markie, who has died aged 57 after suffering from diabetes, earned himself the nickname of “Clown Prince of Rap” for the way he preferred humour and tunefulness to the guns and gangs scattered through the lyrics of more menacing, gangsta-style rappers. He was a fan of the comedians Benny Hill and Richard Pryor, and admitted that “I’d rather have a smile than to be serious.” His biggest hit, Just a Friend (1989), was a rueful tale of his efforts to persuade a girl that “you’ve got what I need!”, only to find his progress blocked by another guy she claimed was “just a friend”.
Over a rolling beat accompanied by clonking piano, the tale was told with tongue-in-cheek histrionics by Markie, who hammed it up energetically on the wailing chorus, and it reached No 9 on the Billboard pop chart. “I knew if I mixed the drums from Lee Dorsey’s Get Out of My Life, Woman with Freddie Scott’s You Got What I Need, I’d go platinum,” he said. The song was boosted by a video featuring Markie’s slapstick impersonation of Mozart, pounding a keyboard while dressed in a cape, ruffled shirt and periwig. Markie insisted that “the song is all true. A girl in California. She dissed me, treated me like a pair of dirty drawers.”
Another of Markie’s claims to fame was to have been at the centre of an event that dealt a body blow to hip-hop. His third album, I Need a Haircut (1991), sold slowly on release, but hit the buffers catastrophically when Gilbert O’Sullivan launched a lawsuit against Markie for using an unauthorised 20-second sample from his 1972 hit Alone Again (Naturally) on the track Alone Again. O’Sullivan’s suit was upheld in the landmark legal ruling Grand Upright Music Ltd v Warner Bros Records Inc, and Markie was ordered to pay $250,000 in damages. The decision sent a seismic shock through the hip-hop world and beyond, since henceforth all samples would have to be legally cleared with the original artists, and duly paid for. Warner Bros withdrew I Need a Haircut from sale.
Biz Markie in the late 1980s, around the time of his biggest hit, Just a Friend. Photograph: David Corio/Getty Images
Markie’s fourth album was entitled All Samples Cleared! (1993), and the cover depicted a re-enactment of the courtroom scene, with Markie playing both judge and defendant, but none of this was enough to make it a hit.
One of six siblings, he was born Marcel Theo Hall in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, and grew up in Patchogue in Long Island. At Longwood high school in Suffolk County he earned a reputation as a prankster. He adopted the alias Biz Markie when he was 14, and described how it was derived from “the first hip-hop tape I heard. It was ’77, ’78, from the L Brothers.” One of the rappers on the tape was Busy Bee Starski, and the name appealed to him. “My name used to be Bizzy B Markie, and after a while I put the Biz with the Markie. My nickname in my neighbourhood was Markie.” He developed a gift for rhyming and beatboxing, his work displaying the wit and playfulness that would become his trademark.
He gained a toehold in the music business by beatboxing for Roxanne Shante, of the Juice Crew collective, and worked his way up through playing Long Island house parties and taking part in rap battles, then working as a DJ in nightclubs in New York City. As word spread about his skills, he found himself in demand at clubs in Washington, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Markie approached the producer Marly Marl (real name Marlon Williams), a founder of the Juice Crew, to make some demo tapes, and Marl helmed his 1985 single Def Fresh Crew, which featured Shante. He signed to Prism Records and released singles including Just Rhymin’ with Biz, on which he duetted with Big Daddy Kane.
Biz Markie, left, and Jonzi D co-hosting Breakin Convention at the Apollo theatre, New York, in 2017. Photograph: Shahar Azran/WireImage
In 1988 he recorded his debut album, Goin’ Off, for Cold Chillin’ Records (Prism’s new name, now with distribution by Warner Bros). It was produced by Marl, and featured lyrics by Kane on five tracks, including the single Pickin’ Boogers. This began with a warning: “Now this may sound disgusting an’ like very gross.” A standout track was Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz, a showcase for his beatboxing skills. The hip-hop guidebook Bring the Noise (1991) praised his ability to “thud like a kick drum or chatter like a hambone”.
His second album, The Biz Never Sleeps (1989, which billed Markie as “The Diabolical Biz Markie”), contained Just a Friend. However, in the wake of the copyright lawsuit, Markie’s career headed off in a new direction, as he focused on DJing rather than recording. He had an acting role in the film Meteor Man (1993), appeared on the TV show In Living Color and shot a freestyle rap commercial for MTV2. He popped up as a guest artist on the Beastie Boys albums Check Your Head, Ill Communication and Hello Nasty.
In 1996 he appeared alongside Wu-Tang Clan, Coolio and others on the album America Is Dying Slowly, which aimed to boost Aids awareness among African-American men. In 1997, a sample of his track A One Two was used on the Rolling Stones song Anybody Seen My Baby? from their album Bridges to Babylon (making it the only Stones song to use sampling).
Markie appeared in the films Men in Black II (2002, playing a beatboxing alien) and Sharknado II (2014), and in numerous TV shows. In 2005 he took part in VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club, a weight-loss competition in which Markie shed more pounds than any other contestant. He filmed commercials for Radio Shack, Heineken, Budweiser and many more.
It was not until 2003 that he released a new album, the ramshackle and intermittently lovable Weekend Warrior. “I don’t want to look like a 50-year-old rapper trying too hard,” he said. “If I’m going to do a record I’m going to do it because I want to do a record.”
Markie happily acknowledged his admiration for mainstream singers like Elton John or Barry Manilow – “I’m just here to entertain and make people happy,” he said – and he looked back fondly to the close-knit underground New York scene, the so-called “old school” from which he emerged. He had appeared with many of his New York compatriots including Shante, LL Cool J and Run-DMC in the documentary film Big Fun in the Big Town (1986), made for Dutch TV and now considered a cult classic. In 2016 he joined other veterans including A Flock of Seagulls and Tiffany on an 80s cruise around the Caribbean.
Markie suffered from persistent weight problems, at one stage weighing 175kg (27st 7lb). “I’d eat, eat, eat, not exercise, go to sleep, eat and eat,” he said. In 2020 he was hospitalised after suffering complications of Type 2 diabetes. At the end of the year he was reportedly in a rehab facility, having suffered a stroke after going into a diabetic coma, and he died in hospital of complications.
He is survived by his wife, Tara (nee Davis), whom he married in 2005.
Beverly Cleary, the celebrated children’s author whose memories of her Oregon childhood were shared with millions through the likes of Ramona and Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins, has died. She was 104.
Cleary’s publisher HarperCollins announced Friday that the author died on Thursday in Northern California, where she had lived since the 1960s. No cause of death was given.
Trained as a librarian, Cleary didn’t start writing books until her early 30s, when she wrote “Henry Huggins,” published in 1950. Children worldwide came to love the adventures of Huggins and neighbors Ellen Tebbits, Otis Spofford, Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby and her younger sister, Ramona. They inhabit a down-home, wholesome setting on Klickitat Street — a real street in Portland, Oregon, the city where Cleary spent much of her youth.
Among the “Henry” titles were “Henry and Ribsy,” “Henry and the Paper Route” and “Henry and Beezus.”
Ramona, perhaps her best-known character, made her debut in “Henry Huggins” with only a brief mention.
“All the children appeared to be only children so I tossed in a little sister and she didn’t go away. She kept appearing in every book,” she said in a March 2016 telephone interview from her California home.
Cleary herself was an only child and said the character wasn’t a mirror.
“I was a well-behaved little girl, not that I wanted to be,” she said. “At the age of Ramona, in those days, children played outside. We played hopscotch and jump rope and I loved them and always had scraped knees.”
In all, there were eight books on Ramona between “Beezus and Ramona” in 1955 and “Ramona’s World” in 1999. Others included “Ramona the Pest” and “Ramona and Her Father.” In 1981, “Ramona and Her Mother” won the National Book Award.
Cleary wasn’t writing recently because she said she felt “it’s important for writers to know when to quit.”
“I even got rid of my typewriter. It was a nice one but I hate to type. When I started writing I found that I was thinking more about my typing than what I was going to say, so I wrote it long hand,” she said in March 2016.
Although she put away her pen, Cleary re-released three of her most cherished books with three famous fans writing forewords for the new editions.
Actress Amy Poehler penned the front section of “Ramona Quimby, Age 8;” author Kate DiCamillo wrote the opening for “The Mouse and the Motorcycle;” and author Judy Blume wrote the foreword for “Henry Huggins.”
Cleary, a self-described “fuddy-duddy,” said there was a simple reason she began writing children’s books.
“As a librarian, children were always asking for books about ‘kids like us.′ Well, there weren’t any books about kids like them. So when I sat down to write, I found myself writing about the sort of children I had grown up with,” Cleary said in a 1993 Associated Press interview.
“Dear Mr. Henshaw,” the touching story of a lonely boy who corresponds with a children’s book author, won the 1984 John Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. It “came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced,” she told National Public Radio as she neared her 90th birthday.
“Ramona and Her Father” in 1978 and “Ramona Quimby, Age 8” in 1982 were named Newbery Honor Books.
Cleary ventured into fantasy with “The Mouse and the Motorcycle,” and the sequels “Runaway Ralph” and “Ralph S. Mouse.” “Socks,” about a cat’s struggle for acceptance when his owners have a baby, is told from the point of view of the pet himself.
She was named a Living Legend in 2000 by the Library of Congress. In 2003, she was chosen as one of the winners of the National Medal of Arts and met President George W. Bush. She is lauded in literary circles far and wide.
Former President George W. Bush with recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2003. From left: musician Buddy Guy; dancer Suzanne Farrell; Bush; author Beverly Cleary; and director Ron Howard.
Tim Sloan / AFP via Getty
She produced two volumes of autobiography for young readers, “A Girl from Yamhill,” on her childhood, and “My Own Two Feet,” which tells the story of her college and young adult years up to the time of her first book.
“I seem to have grown up with an unusual memory. People are astonished at the things I remember. I think it comes from living in isolation on a farm the first six years of my life where my main activity was observing,” Cleary said.
Cleary was born Beverly Bunn on April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, Oregon, and lived on a farm in Yamhill until her family moved to Portland when she was school-age. She was a slow reader, which she blamed on illness and a mean-spirited first-grade teacher who disciplined her by snapping a steel-tipped pointer across the back of her hands.
“I had chicken pox, smallpox and tonsillitis in the first grade and nobody seemed to think that had anything to do with my reading trouble,” Cleary told the AP. “I just got mad and rebellious.”
By sixth or seventh grade, “I decided that I was going to write children’s stories,” she said.
Cleary graduated from junior college in Ontario, California, and the University of California at Berkeley, where she met her husband, Clarence. They married in 1940; Clarence Cleary died in 2004. They were the parents of twins, a boy and a girl born in 1955 who inspired her book “Mitch and Amy.”
Cleary studied library science at the University of Washington and worked as the children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, and post librarian at the Oakland Army Hospital during World War II.
Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and inspired Japanese, Danish and Swedish television programs based on the Henry Huggins series. A 10-part PBS series, “Ramona,” starred Canadian actress Sarah Polley. The 2010 film “Ramona and Beezus” featured actresses Joey King and Selena Gomez.
Cleary was asked once what her favorite character was.
“Does your mother have a favorite child?” she responded.
Cicely Tyson, the award-winning actress who trailblazed a career across several decades and appeared in countless TV shows, films and Broadway plays, died Thursday at age 96, according to her manager. Tyson’s role as a sharecropper’s wife in the film “Sounder” landed her an Oscar nomination in 1973.
“With heavy heart, the family of Miss Cicely Tyson announces her peaceful transition this afternoon,” Tyson’s family said in a statement from her manager. “At this time, please allow the family their privacy.”
Tyson, who first entered the spotlight as a model, was well-known across the entertainment industry, earning two Emmy Awards — best lead actress in a drama and best actress in a special — for her role as a former slave in the 1974 TV drama “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” In a defining moment of the film, Pittman walks up and drinks from the whites-only water fountain.
“Well, when I’m working, I just tell everybody. I said, ‘I don’t care what you see. Please don’t tell me about it … because I work so organically,'” Tyson said. “So the next day, when I came on the set, I knew something had happened. And I simply said, ‘Please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know …’ and people were talking about the walk. I said, ‘What walk?'”
Actress Cicely Tyson holds the two Emmy Awards that she won for her performance in “The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman” on May 28, 1974, in Los Angeles.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In 1994, she won a supporting actress Emmy for her role in “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” and a Tony Award in 2013 at age 88 for best leading actress in the play “The Trip to Bountiful.” She starred alongside Vanessa Williams, who was inspired by Tyson’s work ethic, according to a 2015 interview.
“She did not miss one performance ever. … There’s no excuse to not show up when Cicely Tyson can show up every day,” Williams said at the time about Tyson.
Acceptance Speech Cicely Tyson 2013 by
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Tyson was among a group of 21 actors, musicians, athletes and innovators in 2016 who were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — by former President Obama.
“In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the whole course of history,” Mr. Obama said at the presentation, per ETonline. “Cicely was never the likeliest of Hollywood stars. The daughter of immigrants from the West Indies, she was raised by a hardworking and religious mother who cleaned houses and forbade her children to attend the movies. But once she got her education and broke into the business, Cicely made a conscious decision not just to say lines, but to speak out.”
Cicely Tyson Awarded Medal Of Freedom by
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Also in 2016, Tyson was celebrated with a Kennedy Center Honor for her contributions to American culture, paving the way for African Americans in the industry.
In 2018, she was awarded an honorary Oscar statuette at the annual Governors Awards, according to The Associated Press. “I come from lowly status. I grew up in an area that was called the slums at the time,” Tyson said at the time. “I still cannot imagine that I have met with presidents, kings, queens. How did I get here? I marvel at it.”
Cicely Tyson receives an Honorary Oscar at the 2018 Governors Awards by
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In 2020, Tyson was inducted into the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame and received a Career Achievement Peabody Award.
Her memoir, “Just As I Am,” was released on January 26, the same day that “CBS This Morning” aired an interview between the iconic actress and Gayle King, where Tyson was able to reflect on her roles.
“Whenever I’m offered a script … what I’m interested in when I get it is, ‘why me?'” she said. “Who was that character and why did they want me to play it … and when I get to the point where I feel like her skin has fitted my arm or my mind, then I know there’s something about her.”
Born in 1924 to West Indian parents, Tyson said she was a very shy child, the youngest of three. AP said her parents had moved from the island of Nevis in the Caribbean to New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood. At an early age, her friends urged Tyson to take up modeling because of her striking looks.
Cicely Tyson is honored with a hand and footprint ceremony during the TCM Classic Film Festival at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on April 27, 2018, in Hollywood, California.
Amanda Edwards/WireImage via Getty Images
The journey to stardom, as she recounted to Gayle King, wasn’t an easy one. Tyson became pregnant when she was 17 and had a short marriage that lasted just over two years. Her decision to begin an acting career as a single mother brought conflict at home, including her mother kicking her out of the house.
“Oh, she told me I couldn’t live there and do that,” Tyson said. “Suddenly I found something that I loved to do. And I had a child to support.”
American actors (left to right) Paul Winfield (1941-2004), Yvonne Jarrell, Eric Hooks, Cicely Tyson (1924-2021) and Kevin Hooks as a family of sharecroppers talk with American blues musician Taj Mahal (right) as Ike in this publicity still from the 1972 film “Sounder,” directed by Martin Ritt.
20th Century Fox via Getty Images
Tyson made her on-screen debut at age 31 in the 1956 black-and-white film “Carib Gold.” Through sheer determination, her career blossomed after landing the headline role of playing the wife to a sharecropper in “Sounder” — the 1972 film based on the William H. Hunter novel. Her character was confined in jail for stealing a piece of food for the farmer’s family and was forced to care for their children and attend to the crops.
At the time, a review from The New York Times read: “She passes all of her easy beauty by to give us, at long last, some sense of the profound beauty of millions of Black women.”
Legendary actress Cicely Tyson has died at 96…
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In Tyson’s memoir, she speaks of her love story with jazz great Miles Davis, who put her on the cover of his 1967 album, “Sorcerer.” The two married in 1981, but divorced less than seven years later. However, their romance spanned decades. Tyson told King that she was never able to find a love like that again.
At age 96, Tyson was asked by King what it’s like to be considered a legend.
“I’m amazed every single day I live,” she said. “I mean, what my life became is not what I expected … I had no idea that I would touch anybody.”
When King asked Tyson: “When the time comes, what do you want us to remember about you?”
She replied: “I done my best. That’s all.”
Notable Deaths in 2021
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The Associated Press and ETonline contributed to this report.