50 Years Later: The Might and Majesty of Cicely Tyson and ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman’ Remains [Retrospective]

“This year’s acting awards inspire a singular lack of anticipation,” bemoaned Gary Arnold of The Washington Post on the eve of the April 1974 Academy Awards ceremony. “When you turn to the actresses, all you can do is shrug. You’re haunted by the thoughts that the most imaginative performances of the year, by Liv Ullmann in The New Land and 40 Carats, weren’t even nominated, and that the best performance by an American actress was in a television movie: Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”

A few weeks earlier, Tyson had herself expressed disappointment with the Oscar line-up. “It’s unfortunate there are no Blacks,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “The work hasn’t been there. I had hoped that last year, with myself and Diana Ross and [screenwriter] Lonne Elder, would be the beginning of something that would continue. A breakthrough. [But] there aren’t enough Black actors involved in making films on the level that would put us in a position to qualify.”

There was a bitterness to Tyson’s remarks, and justifiably so. The only performances by Black actresses to qualify for Oscar consideration that year were in Blaxploitation movies. Tyson’s acclaimed performance in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, relegated to television, was ineligible. That had not been the filmmakers’ plan. Nor had it been inevitable. Tyson’s stunning portrayal of Jane Pittman could have brought her an Oscar at that ceremony in April 1974. It should have, only the Hollywood power brokers had been conservative, close-minded, and racist.

Premiering on CBS on the evening of Thursday 31 January 1974, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman starred Tyson as Jane Pittman, a 110-year-old former slave, who recounts incidents from her life spanning the Civil War through to the Civil Rights Movement, each shown as a flashback. The film was a hit with audiences attracting over fifty million viewers. It was also a critical darling collecting nine Emmy Awards, including a Best Lead Actress in a Drama trophy for Tyson.

Across the Atlantic, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival where it was “one of the hits” of the first week. Such was the response that Maurice Bessy, the new director of events, called for the film to be brought into competition so that Tyson could be accorded the Best Actress prize. The festival’s president refused but Tyson nonetheless became the most sought-after star at the event. Screenings in cinemas across Europe followed, and Tyson was subsequently recognised at the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) with a Best Actress nomination alongside Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, and Joanne Woodward in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.

This dual identity of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman – telemovie in North America and feature film in Europe – was not the product of some fractured, quirky distribution deal struck after the film’s completion. Rather it was forged at the outset of production in the film’s financing arrangements. It is a common misconception to view The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as merely a made-for-television movie, one that was subsequently sold to foreign markets for cinema screening. In truth, the film was intentionally produced with the knowledge that it would premiere on the small and big screens on either side of the Atlantic.

Tyson had picked up a copy of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, in a bookstore in Hollywood during the filming of Sounder, the drama for which she earned her only Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. She found it galvanising, inspiring, and timely. “That evening, I read the novel in one sitting,” she later said. “From the first page to the last, I found her story captivating [and] the next morning, bleary-eyed but joyous, I called a few friends to tell them about the book … I would have done Jane Pittman in the basement of a basement. Her story was critical to the cultural moment.”

The actress wanted fervently for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman to be her feature film follow-up to Sounder. She was so committed to the project that she turned down the title part in Claudine, a role that would garner an Oscar nomination for Diahann Carroll. It proved impossible, however, to obtain Hollywood financing for a feature adaptation of Gaines’ novel. Even after the release of Sounder and Tyson’s recognition by the Academy, executives in Hollywood harboured only a narrow conception of roles for Blacks: either the ultraviolent and hypersexualised cartoon figures of exploitation, or the cliched characters in welfare dramas with their contemporary inner-city settings.

Hollywood turned down The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In her memoir, Tyson ruefully explained, “Between 1972 and 1973, Blaxploitation had shifted into sixth gear with disgraceful movies … [Senior producers said], ‘Who wants to listen to an old Black woman tell her story? It won’t sell.’” Exasperated, the actress pointed out that Sounder, which had been made for less than one million dollars, had grossed more than $17 million at the box office. “We know it is a business,” she observed in a piece for the Los Angeles Times printed in August 1973, “But my argument is, who is to say that a good movie with non-exploitative characters will not make money? The investors are frightened. They go where the money is. They deny any responsibility because it is easier to function on that level and have no guilt feelings. It makes it easier for them to laugh all the way to the bank. Who wants the responsibility of destroying a whole generation? Nobody does – but that is exactly what they are doing.” Her counter arguments, however, were to no avail. Hollywood wasn’t interested. Hollywood gatekeepers at the time were close-minded. Hollywood power was male and white.

The anger Tyson felt about the flourishing of Blaxploitation cinema while quality projects centred around Black characters languished in development limbo was as justifiable as it was acutely evident. For years, she had turned down roles in material she felt inappropriate and damaging. “When the Black exploitation pictures started coming out,” she told the Los Angeles Times in December 1973, “I was convinced I’d never do another film. There are times when not working is the lesser of two evils. When Sounder came along, I felt I’d been rewarded for years of waiting. Prior to that, I hadn’t done a movie for more than four years.”

Decades later, the actress elaborated in her memoir: “Blaxploitation cinema found a fertile audience. In a spate of films depicting urban life, the Black man, muted over centuries by bigotry’s cruel muzzle, at last got to play the hero in his own story line. But this newfound creative freedom came at a cost. In my mind, these films gave rise to a misery more harrowing than the realities they portrayed. The Black woman was often cast in a powerless supporting role, or as a hypersexual female eager to fall into bed. Ghetto life and vulgarity were glorified … I made a conscious decision: I would use my profession as my platform – a stage from which to make my voice heard by carefully choosing my projects and portrayals. I could not afford the luxury of simply being an actress. As an artist with the privilege of the spotlight, I felt an enormous responsibility to use that forum as a force for good, as a place from which to display the full spectrum of our humanity. My art had to both mirror the times and propel them forward. I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people – to change the way Black women in particular were perceived, by reflecting our dignity.”

Jane Pittman was a role of passion, honesty, and dignity. It was also a role of immense challenges. In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Tyson portrays Jane at various points in her life between the ages of 18 and 110. At the time of filming, the actress was 48. As the elderly Jane, Tyson was aided enormously by the ground-breaking makeup work of Rick Baker and Stan Winston, however, she also grounded her portrayal in careful research. “I knew there were some aspects of that woman’s life that I could probably handle, but there were others that I didn’t know,” she later explained in an interview for Elle magazine. “I was scared to death. So, I called the producers, and I said, ‘I want to visit an elders’ home to be among people who might have been peers of this woman. I spent a good deal of time talking to them, watching them, feeling them, hoping that I could capture their lives.” Beneath the makeup, Tyson brought a physicality to her performance in terms of posture, gesture, and gait, as well as the rhythm of her speech and a thinness to her voice. The result was compellingly convincing. Drawn deftly from her time with the residents of aged-care homes, Tyson’s transformation, as actress Viola Davis would later say, was “supernatural.”

And along with the supernatural physical transformation, Tyson delivered an emotional performance of searing authenticity. As Jane, she is, in turns, an anxious mother, a lovestruck bride, a heartbroken widow, a dry-humoured old woman, and a steely rights activist. And she weaves all these facets into the tapestry of a whole and singular woman. The episodic nature of Gaines’ story could have resulted in a disjointed portrait and a fractured film. It is the magnetic work of Tyson that binds the material together and gives a grand arc to it all. While the film itself is modest and constrained, her sterling performance makes it a special viewing experience. Tyson’s work is precisely the kind – deeply emotional and physically transformational – that impresses Academy voters.

But it was not to be. A month after Tyson attended the Academy Awards ceremony as a Best Actress nominee for Sounder, the Los Angeles Times reported that The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was to be made as a joint production between CBS and Tomorrow Entertainment, a production company founded by former ABC president Tom Moore and owned at the time by General Electric. Under the terms of the production financing deal, the film would screen in North America as a telemovie while in European markets it would have a theatrical release. A major New York City-based television network was prepared to greenlight a project that Hollywood had declined to support. It was not the first time. As actress Cloris Leachman observed in the mid-1970s, “I’m so proud to be part of the one medium that has made a difference – television. Women and other minority groups are finally being treated fairly. TV explores areas in our society that films never bothered to do.”

Post-production of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was completed by the end of November 1973. Had it been financed by a Hollywood producer, it could have gone into North American cinemas alongside such end-of-year award-season fare as Cinderella Liberty, Don’t Look Now, The Exorcist and Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams. It is fascinating to speculate whether such a release would have brought Tyson a second consecutive Best Actress nomination from the Academy, and whether she would have prevailed at the subsequent Oscar ceremony instead of Glenda Jackson for A Touch of Class. Winning an Academy Award would have meant a great deal to Tyson. “I don’t care what any actor says, that golden statue matters,” she later wrote in her memoir. “It is what we’re all vying for – the ultimate validation from our peers. You empty yourself into a character, you labor hour upon hour to get every single gesture and sentence precise, and you mean to tell me that such an affirmation means nothing to you? It holds tremendous power.”

Instead, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman appeared on CBS at the end of January. “I guess the rest is history,” the actress later remarked. While that history did not bring Tyson an Oscar, it did bring another kind of golden statuette – an Emmy. And it also earned her a place in the pantheon of great American performances, regardless of the medium of first screening. “Cicely Tyson’s performance is an incredible experience to witness,” raved Cecil Smith of the Los Angeles Times, “[and] should be placed in a shrine somewhere for actors through the centuries to come and do homage.” Over at the New York Daily News, meanwhile, Rex Reed praised Tyson for “a personal triumph” and declared, “It should be released as a feature film in movie theaters everywhere; certainly it is as good as any film I saw last year.”

In its passion, strength, and dignity at a time of Blaxploitation cinema, Tyson’s portrayal of Jane Pittman was ground-breaking. It was also inspiring. Viola Davis was only eight years old on that Thursday night at the end of January 1974. But she remembers the premiere of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman vividly. “A new world opened up before my very eyes. A woman who looked just like [my mother] came on television, and something magical happened. Suddenly, I saw her. She had a long neck and was beautiful, dark-skinned, glistening with sweat, high cheek- bones, thick, full lips, and a clean, short Afro. My heart stopped beating. The shame, pain, fear, confusion, all these negative feelings I had about my life and my situation were blasted through a brand-new doorway. It was like a hand reached for mine and I finally saw my way out … I experienced the true power of artistry.”Fifty years after the film’s first showing, could there be a more powerful and passionate endorsement for (re)discovering the astonishing performance of Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman?

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman premiered 31 January 1974 on CBS and is currently available to stream on Crackle and Amazon Freevee with ads.