I’m not going to lie—being chosen for this project can often just be as simple as having reminded me in some way that you’re alive, particularly if you’re very old. This week, someone pointed out to me that Cicely Tyson had been given the Presidential Medal of Freedom—a lot more prestigious than being featured here—and was 92. And I thought, yeah, that’s someone we should talk about now.

The problem with this method over “I feel like writing about [person]” is that, often, it’ll turn out that I haven’t seen much from the person who is still alive and worthy of note that I’ve been reminded of. On the other hand, I chose to write about Kellye Nakahara, who hasn’t actually done much, so there are ways around it. With Cicely Tyson, she has a long, often prestigious career of things I haven’t reliably seen. She is one of a handful of performers who is as much noted for being black and famous before that was much of a thing as for any specific thing she did to become famous.

Which is, I have to tell you, a shame. No, so I haven’t seen much of what she’s done, but I’ve seen enough to know that she’s a fine actress. She gets tapped a lot to play Powerful Black Women, which may go a ways to explaining her career and what of it I’ve seen; I’ve seen a lot of the prestige stuff (Roots, Sounder) and not a lot of the stuff where they’re hoping that she will lend the project prestige (Idlewild, The Price of Heaven). Still, I would argue that at least part of the importance of Cicely Tyson is that she managed to help create an era where casting a black woman in your film or TV show will lend you prestige.

For a while there, though, if you wanted a fierce black woman in the lead of your movie, you cast Cicely Tyson. And then, if you wanted a strong black mother. And now, a powerful black grandmother. And in a way, that’s a triumph for her as much as an actress as it is as a black person, because actresses aren’t always allowed to move from role to role like that. I’m reasonably sure that a lot more ink has been spilled about Cicely Tyson as black than has been spilled about her as a woman, and this is missing a point, somehow. The challenges of black women and black men in the industry have been different, but they’re both still there.

The difference in era between Cicely Tyson and, say, Hattie McDaniel before her is that Cicely Tyson played considerably fewer maids. I won’t say she hasn’t played any, of course, because that’s not true. But it’s worth noting that her mother actually was one, which was more reliable work by the look of it than the series of odd jobs her father held. Cicely Tyson has been working in film, television, and the theatre for over sixty years. That’s a heck of an accomplishment for anyone.