Cicely Tyson Will Make History at the Oscars Tonight

From Harper's BAZAAR

Cicely Tyson is the recipient of tonight's Honorary Academy Award, and our only question is how it's taken her this long to get an Oscar. The 94-year-old (yes, you read that correctly) actress is a veteran of both film and television, and has won a boatload of awards throughout her six-decade-long career, including three Emmys, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Tony Award and, now, an Honorary Academy Award.

It was announced in September that Tyson would be one of the recipients of this year's Honorary Awards, alongside publicist Martin Levy and composer Lalo Schifrin. The awards were presented at the Governors Awards on November 18, but highlights from that event will be incorporated into tonight's Academy Awards per tradition. The win is a historic one, making Tyson the first woman of color ever to win an honorary Academy Award. She was nominated for an Oscar in 1973 for the Depression-era drama Sounder, but has never won.

Tyson is probably best known to contemporary audiences for playing Ophelia Harkness, the mother of Viola Davis's Annalise Keating, on How to Get Away with Murder. She has appeared in films including The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Fried Green Tomatoes, and The Help. One of her most powerful and memorable roles was in the 1974 television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, an adaptation of a historical novel in which she played a woman born into slavery who lived to participate in the civil rights movement.

"It has always been my mission to get people to understand that we are also human, that we are human beings with all the nuts and bolts of being human," Tyson told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, when she was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her role in The Trip to Bountiful. "That has always been my premise. I deal with every character on a humanistic face, because that’s what we are-we all feel the same things and think the same things, whether we want to admit that or not. Why we should be treated differently simply because of the color of our skin is far beyond me."

Tyson's appearance on the red carpet tonight sparked a rapturous response from industry insiders and fans alike.

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