Oscar nominee Ruby Dee dies at 91

[Will42]

Ruby Dee, best known for her role in 1961’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and latterly for her Oscar-nominated turn as Denzel Washington’s mother in 2007’s “American Gangster,” died Wednesday in New York. She was 91.

Dee’s Oscar nomination in 2008 for her performance as the feisty mother of a Harlem druglord played by Washington in Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” was particularly impressive because the actress made an impression on the Motion Picture Academy with only 10 minutes of screen time. She won a SAG Award for the same performance.

Dee also won an Emmy in 1991 for her performance in the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” movie “Decoration Day.”

She and her husband, Ossie Davis, who often performed together, were among the first generation of African-American actors, led by Sidney Poitier, afforded the opportunity for significant, dignified dramatic roles in films, onstage and on television.

When Dee and Davis (who died in 2005) were announced as recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, the center described them as “one of the most revered couples of the American stage, two of the most prolific and fearless artists in American culture. As individuals and as a team they have created profound and lasting work that has touched us all. With courage and tenacity they have thrown open many a door previously shut tight to African American artists and planted the seed for the flowering of America’s multicultural humanity.”

Dee and Davis were civil rights activists beginning in the early 1950s during the controversy over the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Later they were involved in Martin Luther King’s March on Washington.

In 1959 Dee starred alongside Poitier, playing Ruth Younger, sister to his Walter Younger, in the original, landmark Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first play by a black woman to receive a Rialto staging and the first Main Stem play to be directed by a black man, Lloyd Richards. The play, Poitier and Richards were all nominated for Tonys.

Dee, Poitier and others from the cast reproduced their performances for the 1961 film adaptation, which was selected for the National Film Registry in 2005.

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/oscar-nominated-actress-ruby-dee-dies-at-91-1201219148/

Very sad news. R.I.P.