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 No cause of death was given.
Tyson had recently completed a memoir, "Just As
I Am," which was released just this week.
Tyson's most-lauded performances came in
historical works such as the 1972 movie
"Sounder" in which she played a Louisiana
sharecropper's wife. That film earned Tyson her
only Academy Award nomination, but she received
an honorary Oscar in November 2018.
She also won two Emmys for the same TV movie,
"The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" - one
for best actress in a miniseries or movie and
one for actress of the year. The 1974 movie
covered a woman's life from slavery to the
1960s.
Tyson picked up another Emmy 20 years later for
"Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All." Her
nine other Emmy nominations included playing
Binta, the mother of the slave Kunta Kinte in
the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries "Roots," the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s wife, Coretta, in
"King," and the inspirational educator in "The
Marva Collins Story."
Her manager, Larry Thompson, said in a statement
that Tyson
"thought of her new memoir as a Christmas tree
decorated with all the ornaments of her personal
and professional life."
"Today she placed the last ornament, a Star, on
top of the tree," he added.
Tyson's career boomed even in her 80s. In 2011,
she was part of the ensemble of the much-praised
film "The Help" and in 2013, at age 88, she won
a Tony for a Broadway revival of "The Trip to
Bountiful," the story of a woman returning to
her small hometown. It was her first time on
Broadway in 30 years.
Even after turning 90, Tyson was busy. In 2015,
she starred with frequent collaborator James
Earl Jones in a Broadway revival of the
two-person play "The Gin Game." The New York
Times said Tyson and Jones, who had last
appeared on Broadway almost 50 years earlier,
proved "that great talent is ageless and
ever-rewarding."
In February 2019 at age 94, Tyson was on the
cover of Time magazine's "The Art of Optimism"
edition and an interviewer asked if she had
considered retiring. "And do what?" was her
response.
'STILL WE HOLD ON'
Tyson said she used her career to take on issues
important to her, such as race and gender.
"I realized very early on when I was asked
certain questions or treated in a certain way
that I needed to use my career to address those
issues," she said in a People magazine interview
in 2015.
Tyson told CBS she saw the Hollywood hierarchy
as a ladder with white men at the top, followed
by white women and Black men. Black women were
at the bottom.
"And we're holding on to the last rung," she
said. "And those fists are being trampled on by
all those three above and still we hold on."
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 Actress Viola Davis said she
was "devastated" by news of the death of Tyson,
who played the mother of Davis' character on the
TV legal drama "How to Get Away with Murder"
from 2015 to 2020.
"You were everything to me!" Davis wrote on
Instagram. "You made me feel loved and seen and
valued in a world where there is still a cloak
of invisibility for us dark chocolate girls."
LeVar Burton, who portrayed Kunta Kinte in
"Roots," praised his "first screen Mom."
"Elegance, warmth, beauty, wisdom, style and
abundant grace," Burton wrote on Twitter. "She
was as regal as they come."
Tyson was born in December 1924 in New York and
grew up in the city's Harlem neighborhood, the
daughter of immigrants from the West Indies. She
was a secretary and model before taking acting
jobs in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, she
became one of the first Black actors to appear
regularly on U.S. television, playing George C.
Scott's secretary on the series "East Side, West
Side."
One of her early stage roles was in "The
Blacks," an off-Broadway production about race
that helped boost the careers of Jones, Maya
Angelou, Louis Gossett Jr., Godfrey Cambridge
and Roscoe Lee Brown.
Tyson took parts as prostitutes in two other
plays in the 1960s before deciding to make a
stand.
"After that, I was offered the part of another
whore and I said no because I didn't want to get
typecast and because it was demeaning to Black
women," she told the New York Times.
Tyson was given the Presidential Medal of
Freedom by Barack Obama in 2016. When she was
presented with a Kennedy Center Honor in
December 2005, filmmaker-writer Tyler Perry
said: "She chose to empower us when we didn't
even know it was possible to be empowered.
Cicely refused to take a role that would not
better humanity."
Tyson was married to jazz trumpet legend Miles
Davis from 1981 to 1988 and Davis, who died in
1991, put her on the cover of his album
"Sorcerer."
Their marriage was rocky, troubled by reports of
his alleged philandering, domestic violence and
substance abuse. But in a 2015 interview with
CBS, Tyson said: "I don't really talk about it
but I will say this: I cherish every single
moment that I had with him."
(Reporting by Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles and
Bill Trott; Editing by Chris Reese and Peter
Cooney)
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