Actress/civil rights activist and Cleveland native Ruby Dee, 91, died on Wednesday at her home in New Rochelle, New York.
She was married to actor/civil rights activist
Ossie Davis.
She was in “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark drama about
the struggle of a black family in Chicago at the dawn of the civil rights
movement, in 1959 with Sidney Poitier.
The play had 530 performances on Broadway and was reprised, with much of
the cast intact, as a 1961 film.
She was an Oscar nominee for a supporting role in the 2007 movie “American
Gangster,” about a Harlem drug lord (Denzel Washington), as a loving mother who
turned a blind eye to her son’s criminality.
She married singer Frankie Dee Brown in 1941, and kept the Dee name although
they divorced after four years of marriage.
In 1998 Ruby and Ossie published a joint autobiography, “With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together,” to
commemorate their 50th wedding anniversary.
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