Ms. Cicely Tyson is elegance personified. She is excellence. She is courage. When I think of her, I think of the Stevie Wonder lyrics: “Show me how to do like you. Show me how to do it.”

The first time I encountered her I was a little girl living in a tenement in Central Falls, Rhode Island. There, sitting on the floor with my sisters, I watched The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which Ms. Tyson depicts the life of a formerly enslaved woman from about age 23 to nearly 110. When my sister said, “That’s the same actress,” I couldn’t believe it. I lived in a sea of white faces, on-screen and off, and here was this woman who looked like me—and she was performing magic.

It was impossible not to fall in love with everything she did, this Harlem-born daughter of immigrants, fighting to portray a wide-ranging humanity too rarely afforded actresses of color: our sexuality, our anger, our joy, our wildness. As a teenager I watched her in Bustin’ Loose, The Marva Collins Story, and Sounder, which earned her an Oscar nomination. Later, as a student at a Circle in the Square Theatre workshop, I came across photos of her on Broadway in the 60s: a chocolate girl with a short fro acting alongside Alvin Ailey and Claudia McNeil in Tiger Tiger Burning Bright; shining in Sidney Poitier’s Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights.

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When I was cast as Annalise in ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder, I could think of no one other than Ms. Tyson to play her mother. Our first scenes were more poignant than I could have imagined. There I was sitting on the floor like a little girl again, and there was Ms. Tyson behind me, her strong hands parting my hair and scratching my scalp the way hundreds of thousands of black mothers have done for their daughters; the way mine did for me.

Those famous Shakespeare lines come to mind: “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.” Ms. Tyson has always been my muse, leading me down this path of life, holding the lantern, paving the way.