NEW YORK (AP) — Cicely Tyson, the pioneering Black actor who gained an Oscar nomination for her role as the sharecropper’s wife in “Sounder,” won a Tony Award in 2013 at age 88 and touched TV viewers’ hearts in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” died Thursday at age 96.

Tyson’s death was announced by her family, via her manager Larry Thompson, who did not immediately provide additional details.

“With heavy heart, the family of Miss Cicely Tyson announces her peaceful transition this afternoon. At this time, please allow the family their privacy,” according to a statement issued through Thompson.

A onetime model, Tyson began her screen career with bit parts but gained fame in the early 1970s when Black women were finally starting to get starring roles. Tyson refused to take parts simply for the paycheck, remaining choosey.

“I’m very selective as I’ve been my whole career about what I do. Unfortunately, I’m not the kind of person who works only for money. It has to have some real substance for me to do it,” she told The Associated Press in 2013.

Tributes from two former presidents and from across the worlds of Hollywood and Broadway poured in, with many praising her careful approach to her career and activism. “She took pride in knowing that whenever her face was on camera, she would be playing a character who was a human being — flawed but resilient; perfect not despite but because of their imperfections,” wrote former President Barack Obama, who awarded Tyson the Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Former President Bill Clinton wrote online that Tyson “brought complex characters to life with dignity and heart, and humanity and depth, always remaining true to herself.” “She used her career to illuminate the humanity in Black people. The roles she played reflected her values,” wrote Oprah Winfrey.

Tyson’s memoir, “Just As I Am,” was published this week.

Cicely Tyson poses with her Emmy statuettes at the annual Emmy Awards presentation in Los Angeles, Ca., May 28, 1974. Tyson won for her role in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" for actress of the year, special, and best lead actress in a tel… — Cicely Tyson poses with her Emmy statuettes at the annual Emmy Awards presentation in Los Angeles, Ca., May 28, 1974. Tyson won for her role in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" for actress of the year, special, and best lead actress in a television drama for a special program. (AP)

Besides her Oscar nomination, she won two Emmys for playing the 110-year-old former slave in the 1974 television drama “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” A new generation of moviegoers saw her in the 2011 hit “The Help.”

“Sounder,” based on the William H. Hunter novel, was the film that confirmed her stardom in 1972. Tyson was cast as the Depression-era loving wife of a sharecropper (Paul Winfield) who is confined in jail for stealing a piece of meat for his family. She is forced to care for their children and attend to the crops.

The New York Times reviewer wrote: “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.” Her performance evoked rave reviews, and Tyson won an Academy Award nomination as best actress of 1972.

In the 1974 television drama “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, Tyson is seen aging from a young woman in slavery to a 110-year-old who campaigned for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Cicely Tyson peers through a monocle at the Dorchester Hotel in London, Feb. 19, 1973. (AP)

In the touching climax, she laboriously walks up to a “whites only” water fountain and takes a drink as white officers look on.

“It’s important that they see and hear history from Miss Jane’s point of view,” Tyson told The New York Times. “And I think they will be more ready to accept it from her than from someone younger”

New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael offered her praise: “She’s an actress, all right, and as tough-minded and honorable in her methods as any we’ve got.”

Tyson made her movie debut in the late 1950s with small roles in such films as “Odds Against Tomorrow,” “The Last Angry Man,” and “The Comedians.” She played the romantic interest to Sammy Davis Jr.’s jazz musician in “A Man Called Adam.”

She gained wider notice with a recurring role in the 1963 drama series “East Side, West Side,” which starred George C. Scott as a social worker. Tyson played his secretary, making her the first Black woman to have a continuing role in a dramatic television series.

Cicely Tyson blows a kiss after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Nov. 22, 2016, in Washington. (AP)

She played a role in the 1968 drama “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” that was hailed by a reviewer as “an absolute embodiment of the slogan ‘Black is beautiful.’” In “Roots,” the 1977 miniseries that became one of the biggest events in TV history, she played Binta, mother of the protagonist, Kunta Kinte, played by LeVar Burton.

She also appeared on Broadway in the 1960s in “The Cool World,” “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” and other plays. Off-Broadway, she appeared with such future stars as Maya Angelou, Godfrey Cambridge and James Earl Jones in a 1961 production of French playwright Jean Genet’s “The Blacks.”

She won a Drama Desk award in 1962 for a role in the off-Broadway “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl.”

After her “Sounder” and “Miss Jane Pittman” successes, Tyson continued to seek TV roles that had messages, and she succeeded with “Roots” and “King” (about Martin Luther King) and “The Rosa Parks Story.”

She complained to an interviewer: “We Black actresses have played so many prostitutes and drug addicts and house maids, always negative. I won’t play that kind of characterless role any more, even if I have to go back to starving.”

She continued with such films as “The Blue Bird,” “Concorde — Airport ’79,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” “The Grass Harp” and Tyler Perry’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.”

She won a supporting actress Emmy in 1994 for “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.” She was nominated for Emmys several other times, including for “Roots,” “King,” “The Marva Collins Story” “Sweet Justice” and “A Lesson Before Dying.”

In recent years, she was part of a panel discussion for “Cherish the Day,” an eight-episode OWN anthology series created and produced by Ava DuVernay. She played the mother of Viola Davis’ character on “How to Get Away with Murder.”

Tyson’s parents moved from the island of Nevis in the Caribbean to New York, where Cicely (her name was spelled early on as Cecily and Sicely) was born in 1924, the youngest of three children. When her parents separated, her mother went on welfare. At 9 Cicely sold shopping bags on the streets of East Harlem.

When she graduated from high school, she found work as a secretary at the Red Cross. Her striking looks prompted friends to advise her to take up modeling and that led to acting schools, theater, movies and television.

“My mother told me I could no longer live in her house because I was determined to be an actress,” she told an interviewer in 1990. “I said `OK,’ and I moved out.”

Tyson was married once, to jazz great Miles Davis. The wedding was held in 1981 at Bill Cosby’s home in Massachusetts, attended by show business notables. They divorced in 1988.

In 2018, she was given an honorary Oscar statuette at the annual Governors Awards. “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.”

And forever, we will marvel at her legacy.

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AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.