NEW YORK — For Ruby Dee, acting and activism were not contradictory things. They were inseparable and they were intertwined. ADVERTISING NEW YORK — For Ruby Dee, acting and activism were not contradictory things. They were inseparable and they were
NEW YORK — For Ruby Dee, acting and activism were not contradictory things. They were inseparable and they were intertwined.
The African-American actress who earned lead roles in movies and on Broadway also spent her entire life fighting against injustice, even emceeing the 1963 March on Washington and protesting apartheid in South Africa.
“We are image makers. Why can’t we image makers become peacemakers, too?” she asked after she and her husband Ossie Davis accepted the Screen Actors Guild Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000.
That legacy of entertaining and pushing for change — in addition to her epic love affair with Davis — made Dee, who died at age 91 in her New Rochelle, New York, home on Wednesday night, a beloved figure in America and beyond. Broadway theaters will dim their lights in her honor Friday night.
As a sign of how influential Dee has been to generations of performers, she was thanked twice from the podium at this Sunday’s Tony Awards — by six-time winner Audra McDonald and new Tony winner director Kenny Leon.
“She will be missed but never forgotten as she lives on in many of us,” Leon said in a statement Thursday, noting that Dee’s passing came just weeks after the death of Maya Angelou. “Maya and Ruby leave us only days apart — those two women with four letter names instructed us on how to live.”
Dee’s long career earned her an Emmy, a Grammy, two Screen Actors Guild awards, the NAACP Image Award, Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Art, and the National Civil Rights Museum’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She got an Oscar nomination at age 83 for best supporting actress for her role in the 2007 film “American Gangster.”
Spike Lee, who directed Dee and her husband in “Do the Right Thing,” took to Instagram to say he was “crushed.” He said it was one of his “great blessings in life to work with two of the finest artists and activists — Ruby and Ossie.”
Dee made her Broadway debut in the original production of “South Pacific” and in 1959 starred in the Broadway premiere of “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play about black frustration amid racial discrimination, opposite Sidney Poitier. Both reprised that role in the film two years later.
Davis and Dee, who met in 1945 when she auditioned for the Broadway play “Jeb,” and married on a day off from another play in 1948, shared billing in 11 stage productions and five movies during long parallel careers.
But they were more than a performing couple. They were also activists who fought for civil rights, particularly for blacks. “We used the arts as part of our struggle,” she said in 2006.
