Esteemed stage, film and TV actress whose petite stature and gentle and genteel manner often mask her characters' inner strength and determination. Dee came out of the famed American Negro Theatre in Harlem with such colleagues as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte with whom she has often worked.
She first appeared with future husband and frequent co-star Ossie Davis (they married in 1948) in the Broadway production "Jeb" (1946) and subsequently won acclaim on Broadway as Ruth Younger, the quiet, supportive wife in Lorraine Hansberry's ground-breaking family drama "A Raisin in the Sun" (1959; and recreated the role in the 1961 film). 5 Since 1950 when Dee portrayed Rachel Robinson in "The Jackie Robinson Story", she has usually been typecast in supportive wife roles, frequently opposite her husband. She co-scripted "Uptight" (1968), Jules Dassin's remake of "The Informer" updated to a black milieu and played a spirited frontier woman in Sidney Poitier's "Buck and the Preacher" (1972).
Dee may be best know to younger filmgoers goers for her work with director Spike Lee, turning in two very different yet equally riveting performances: Mother Sister, the prickly, stern neighborhood watchdog in "Do the Right Thing" (1989) and the soft-hearted mother of two very different sons--one a successful architect, the other a strung out junkie--in "Jungle Fever" (1991). She was cast as Mother Abigail in the miniseries "Stephen King's The Stand" (1994), a character symbolizing the force for good in this comic book parable about the end of the world. Heavily made up, she gave dignity to a role that could have easily slipped into caricature.
A published novelist, poet and columnist for the "Amsterdam News," Dee, and Ossie Davis, have been longtime activists in the civil rights movement and the couple was honored in 1970 with the Frederick Douglass Award from New York's Urban League.
Ruby Dee