Ruby Dee, and actor acclaimed for her role in "A Raisin in the Sun" (1961) and nominated at the Oscars for her performance as Denzel Washington's mother in "American Gangster" (2007), has died at age 91.
Dee died on Wednesday night at her residence in New York.
She first appeared onscreen in the 1946 all-black musical "That Man of Mine." Her performance in "The Jackie Robinson Story" brought her to national attention.
Her long career in acting cut across all major forms of media over a period of 80 years.
She was the recipient of awards like an Emmy, Grammy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Awards. She was also bestowed the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. Dee was married to actor Ossie Davis until his death in 2005.
"The members of the African American Film Critics Association are deeply saddened at the loss of actress and humanitarian Ruby Dee," said Robertson. "Throughout her seven-decade career, Ms. Dee embraced different creative platforms with her various interpretations of black womanhood and also used her gifts to champion for Human Rights. Her strength, courage and beauty will be greatly missed", said Gil Robertson IV of the African American Film Critics Association in a statement.
Dee was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922, to Gladys Hightower and Marshall Edward Nathaniel Wallace, a cook, waiter and porter. She moved to New York's Harlem as a child where she went on to graduate from Hunter College with a degree in romance languages in 1945.
She took the surname Dee after marrying blues singer Frankie Dee two decades later. She divorced Dee after a short marriage and was wedded to Ossie Davis in 1948. Davis preceded his wife in death in 2005.
Dee and Davis were civil rights activists since the early 1950s during the controversy over the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were involved in Martin Luther King's March on Washington.
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