Actor-activist Ruby Dee dies
Ruby Dee earned Oscar nod at 83 for American Gangster
NEW YORK — Ruby Dee was an acclaimed performer and civil rights activist whose versatile career spanned stage, radio, television and film. She died Wednesday at age 91 of natural causes at home in New Rochelle, Conn.
“We have had her for so long and we loved her so much,” said daughter Nora Davis Day.
Dee’s long career brought her an Oscar nomination at age 83 for best supporting actress for her role in the 2007 film American Gangster. She also wonan Emmy and was nominated for several others. Age didn’t slow her down.
“I think you mustn’t tell your body, you mustn’t tell your soul, ‘I’m going to retire,’” Dee told The Associated Press in 2001. “You may be changing your life emphasis, but there’s still things that you have in mind to do that now seems the right time to do. I really don’t believe in retiring as long as you can breathe.”
Dee frequently acted alongside her husband of 56 years, Ossie Davis. She and her late husband were frequent collaborators — not just as performers. They were also activists who fought for civil rights.
“We used the arts as part of our struggle,” she said at an appearance in Jackson, Miss., in 2006.
In 1998, the pair celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and an even longer association in show business with the publication of a dual autobiography: With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. Davis died in February 2005. Davis and Dee met in 1945 when she auditioned for the Broadway play Jeb, starring Davis (both were cast in it). In December 1948, on a day off from rehearsals from another play, Davis and Dee took a bus to New Jersey to get married.
As young performers, they found themselves caught up the growing debate over social and racial justice in the United States. In 1999, they were arrested while protesting the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by New York City police.
They were friends with baseball star Jackie Robinson and his wife, Rachel — Dee played her, opposite Robinson himself, in the 1950 movie The Jackie Robinson Story — and with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Dee and Davis served as masters of ceremonies for the historic 1963 March on Washington and she spoke at the funerals for both King and Malcolm X.
Among her best-known films was A Raisin in the Sun, in 1961, that explored racial discrimination and black frustration. She was a leading cast member on TV soap operas in the 1950s and ’60s, a rare sight for a black actress in those decades.
Dee was the voice of wisdom and reason as Mother Sister in Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, alongside her husband. She won an Emmy as supporting actress in a miniseries or special for 1990s Decoration Day.
She won a National Medal of the Arts in 1995 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild in 2000. In 2004, she and Davis received Kennedy Center Honors. In 2007, after Davis’s death, the recording of their memoir won a Grammy.
The role that brought her an Oscar nomination at age 83 was as the mother of Denzel Washington’s title character in Ridley Scott’s crime drama American Gangster.
Born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland on Oct. 27, 1922 to parents who soon split, Dee moved to Harlem as an infant with a brother and two sisters, living with relatives and neighbours. She graduated from highly competitive Hunter High School in 1939 and enrolled at Hunter College. “I wanted to be an actor but the chances for success did not look promising,” she wrote in her joint autobiography.
But in 1940 she got a part in a Harlem production of a new play, On Strivers Row, which she later called “one giant step” to becoming a person and a performer.
She is survived by three children: Nora, Hasna and Guy; and seven grandchildren.