Post by profblues on Jun 12, 2014 17:22:34 GMT -5
Ruby Dee, who passed at age 91 yesterday, was a stage and screen actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and activist. She is perhaps best known for co-starring in the film A Raisin in the Sun (1961) seen above with Sidney Poitier and the film American Gangster (2007) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was the recipient of Grammy, Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Awards as well as the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. She was married to actor Ossie Davis until his death in 2005.
some of her other works....
The Jackie Robinson Story
Saint Louis Blues (with Nat King Cole)
Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever for Spike Lee
in addition to her stage and screen work, Dee and husband Ossie Davis were well-known civil rights activists.Dee was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Delta Sigma Theta sorority and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, Dee emceed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dee and Davis were both personal friends of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, with Davis giving the eulogy at Malcolm X's funeral in 1965. In 1970, she won the Frederick Douglass Award from the New York Urban League.
