I grew up watching Cicely Tyson on TV in my parents’ bedroom. Her strength inspired me to become an actor. So when I got the chance to work with her I was nervous about meeting this legendary figure. It was a TV movie in 1990, The Kid Who Loved Christmas; she played a social worker and my character was trying to adopt. Cicely was petite but had a very strong presence. I did one take of our scene and she looked at me. Take a deep breath, she said. Settle down and focus. She knew I could do better and was calming and grounding me. You got this, she was saying.

Cicely became a true mentor. We were in the movie Hoodlum, about “Bumpy” Johnson, where she played a kingpin in Harlem. Then in 2013 we were on Broadway together in The Trip to Bountiful, written by Horton Foote and directed by the phenomenal Michael Wilson. She had wanted to do the play for decades and Carrie Watts was a spectacular role for her. I played her daughter-in-law, who is shrill, impatient and uncomfortable with having to live in her mother-in-law’s home. The tension was high.

She was 88 when we did the play – it was a tremendous amount of dialogue and physicality, eight shows a week, and she didn’t miss a performance. She had been a vegetarian for years, and in her dressing room she had a sod of grass on her countertop; every day she would cut it and put it in a blender. Each night after the curtain call, I was on one side of her and Cuba Gooding Jr was on the other. She’d hook our arms and we would lift her off the stage and her feet would bicycle in the air underneath as she said: “Wheee!” Then we’d put her down. She’d look at us and say: “That was a good one!” I was linking arms with a legend. That’s what I want the thrill of the theatre to mean – when you can’t do anything but perform because that’s your gift.

We did a TV movie of the Broadway production, so I got a chance to work with her for a solid couple of years. We would have stayed on Broadway longer but they had already booked another show into the theatre. We were pulling in such crowds – theatre fans and black audiences who didn’t know Horton Foote but knew Cicely Tyson. All the black ladies from the churches would come in busloads and gather together. There was free wine at the Wednesday matinees, and the electricity was incredible. The audience would howl and clap and cheer and jeer me, because I was the sassy baddy who needed a good spanking.

Cicely was our Meryl Streep – a consummate actor in iconic films including Sounder, Roots and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. She had such a sense of humour – she’d smack your thigh if you were sat next to her, take your hand and squeeze it. She always had calming, sound, maternal advice. She was tremendously open and available to you but you had to be equally open and available.

I would ask her about her relationship with Miles Davis. Some of that stuff was still painful for her. She worked with Miles to get him sober and was a huge force in his life, committed to cleaning up his nutrition and focus. I can’t wait to read her memoir, which is about to be published.

I have really been lucky: both Diahann Carroll and Eartha Kitt played my mother on screen. To star on stage with Cicely Tyson? That was big for me – it was being on Broadway with the best.