After a long career in movies and on television, Ruby Dee will most likely be remembered by many as Denzel Washington‘s mother in Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster, a performance for which she was nominated for an Oscar and won a Screen Actors Guild Award. Today we learn she passed away yesterday, June 11, at the age of 91.
Another generation of fans will remember Dee for her role in 1961’s A Raisin in the Sun and as a part of the one-two-punch power couple that was her and her husband Ossie Davis, who passed away in 2005, but not before they were honored at the 2004 Kennedy Center Honors where they were described 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 is survived by their three children: daughters Nora and Hasna and son Guy Davis, an actor, blues musician and choreographer. [Deadline]
