Ruby Ann Wallace was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Oct. 27, 1924. Her mother, Gladys Hightower, left her father, Marshall Edward Nathaniel Wallace, when she was young. She grew up in Harlem with her father and his second wife, Emma Amelia Bunson, a schoolteacher. Graduating from Manhattan’s Hunter College in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in romantic languages, Ruby quickly found her way to the theater.
While in college in 1942, Ruby appeared in “South Pacific” with renowned African-American theater actor Canada Lee. This is perhaps where the bug bit; she joined the American Negro Theater, working with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. She frequented Broadway during the ’40s. When she auditioned in 1946 for the show “Jeb,” she met the man who would be her lover, friend, and fellow fighter for civil rights for her entire life.
This couple co-penned their joint autobiography, “With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together” in 1998. It chronicles the bus ride they took one afternoon to New Jersey to get married, the 11 theater productions and five films they shared the spotlight on, their fight for equal rights in the 1960s (especially in the film industry), and their open marriage. Davis died in 2005, and Ruby sat at his coffin while he was eulogized by many including President Bill Clinton. The couple was married for 57 years.
Ruby Dee was the first black woman to play a lead role in the American Shakespeare Festival, playing Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew” and Cordelia in “King Lear.” She also was featured in films in the 1960s famous for their outspoken politics towards blacks, including “Gone are the Days” and “The Incident.”
Ruby appeared with the legendary Sidney Poitier in his debut film role in “No Way Out,” (1950). Eleven years later they shared the heat of black, lower-income Chicago poverty in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Playing Ruth Younger, a role she’d had two years earlier on Broadway, she tore apart the then-taboo subject of racial discrimination with Poitier on screen. She won the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. Here is a scene from the film, provided by Cinemactor.
Career ups-and-downs followed “A Raisin in the Sun,” but Ruby said her role in the theater show, “Boesman and Lena” shattered the compartmentalizing roles she’d had until then. In her first stage appearance in four years, she played a South African woman of mixed race, illuminating the struggles and rejections faced from both whites and blacks during the apartheid years. She also was one of the first black women to have a major presence in TV soap operas such as the popular drama “Peyton Place.”
Dee’s trajectory of fighting for civil justice was non-linear and boundless. For example in 1953, she took up the fight for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, sentenced to death for wartime sabotage. When a bomb was thrown into a church in 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, and four little girls were killed, she started the Association of Artists for Freedom with her husband. She was also a huge supporter and friend of Martin Luther King Jr., getting involved with his march on Washington. She and Davis were arrested in 1999 for protesting the New York City police shooting and killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s a vital part of cinema history. If you’ve seen it, watch it again soon. The racial hotbed of Bed-Stuy Brooklyn in the late ’80s is so vividly depicted by a young Spike Lee that you can feel the steam rising from the pavement. Dee is featured as Mother Sister, a wise, crusty old woman who watches the neighborhood tear itself apart from racist violence. Ossie Davis shows up as Da Mayor, a drunk who manages to swoon Mother Sister. Her scene at the end as she clutches her hair screaming “No! No!” over and over again amidst the chaos, is heartbreaking. Here is a youtube clip from MovieClips featuring Dee and Davis.
Ruby Dee’s one and only Oscar nomination was for her role as Denzel Washington’s indignant mother in the 2007 film, “American Gangster.” Her role is brief, but powerful, especially this scene on youtube from MovieClips where she finally confronts Washington with rage. She picked up the Screen Actors Guild award for the role, but lost out to Tilda Swinton on Oscar night.
Even though she dead, her activism will go on. The Ruby Dee Scholarship in Dramatic Art was established to provide opportunity for young black women who wish to break into acting. She and Ossie also created the Institute of New Cinema Artists, which trains and encourages young folk to break into film and TV. She is survived by her three children, Guy Davis, Nora Day, and Hasna Muhammad.
