Dee, Ruby

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Dee, Ruby

Sex:  Female

Born:  Cleveland, Ohio, United States
27 October 1924

Activity/Profession:  Stage / Screen Actor, Civil Rights Activist, Political Activist, Fiction Writer, Radio / Television Writer, Television Actor

(b. 27 October 1924),
writer, director, actor, activist.

A true Renaissance woman—poet, writer, director, adaptor, actor, activist, philanthropist, wife and mother—Ruby Dee summed up her approach to life in I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America: “You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, ‘Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there—school, marriage, babies, career.’ The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness.”

Birth and School Days

Born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, Ruby Dee grew up in Harlem. The daughter of Marshall Wallace, who worked as a railroad porter and waiter, and Emma Benson Wallace, who had been a teacher, she was one of four children. Dee grew up in a household that promoted knowledge of the arts and a love of language. She also grew up in the Great Depression, which served as a crucible for her later activism. When she was eleven, her music teacher, laid off when government funds for the program ran out, committed suicide. At a mass meeting after the teacher's death Dee spoke in favor of reinstating the music program. Adam Clayton Powell spoke at the same meeting.

Ruby Dee onstage with Ossie Davis in Robert Ardrey's play JEB, 1946.

Library of Congress

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Writing came early in Dee's life as well. When she was a teenager, she began submitting poetry to the New York Amsterdam News. (She later wrote a column for the paper.) After passing its strict entrance requirements, she attended the elite Hunter High School. It was while in high school that she decided to become an actress. Dee remembers that the decision was made after she read part of a play aloud in class and was applauded.

Early Career

After high school, Dee attended Hunter College (now part of the City University of New York system), graduating in 1945. During this period she chose the stage name Ruby Dee and became an apprentice with the American Negro Theater (ANT). In addition to Dee, among the many celebrated alumni of ANT are Alice Childress, Hilda Simms, Canada Lee, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Earle Hyman. The theatre was in the basement of the West 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Like many young actors in small companies, the actors at ANT did every job needed to make the theater survive: cleaning, building sets, or selling tickets.

In 1943, while still in college, she made her Broadway debut as a walk-on in the play (not the musical) South Pacific. One year after graduating from Hunter, Dee received a meatier role in Jeb, a timely drama about a returning war hero. While the critical response to the play was good, it had only nine performances. However, the show did give Dee the opportunity to meet the actor playing the lead role, Ossie Davis. The two worked on various productions together for the next two years and were married in 1948 during a day off from rehearsals for Garson Kanin's Smile of the World.

Dee's first movie was Love in Syncopation in 1946. The same year she toured nationally in the title role in Anna Lucasta. In 1950 Dee appeared in two films, No Way Out, which starred Sidney Poitier and Ossie Davis in their film debuts, and The Jackie Robinson Story, in which she played Robinson's wife. In 1953 Dee took an enormous risk with her career when she spoke out publicly in support of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who, having been convicted of sabotage and treason, were sentenced to death. This was the period when the House Un-American Activities Committee was blacklisting artists and performers, among others. People lost their jobs for speaking out, and many were left with ruined careers as well. To express her views publicly at such a time was incredibly brave. This experience, by her own report, opened Dee's eyes to the universality of oppression and the importance of art to effect change. It also led to her receiving her first non-black role, the Defending Angel in The World of Sholem Aleichem.

Dee continued to work steadily in film and on stage throughout the 1950s. Her film work included Go, Man, Go! (1954) and Take a Giant Step (1959). In 1955 she took over the title role in “This Is Norah Drake,” a daytime radio serial. In the film Edge of the City (1957), she was again paired with Poitier. Donald Bogle writes that Dee's climactic scene in this film “is a virtuoso sequence, one of her finest on screen.” In 1959 Dee had an even greater success with her role in Lorainne Hansberry's classic play, A Raisin in the Sun. She received rave reviews for her controlled yet powerful performance as Ruth, the wife of Walter Lee Younger (Poitier, yet again). She also played Ruth in the 1961 film.

Through the 1960s

Dee debuted on television in Actor's Choice in 1960 and went on to make guest appearances on various television series, including the Play of the Week production Seven Times Monday, as well series such as The Fugitive, The Defenders, The Great Adventure, and East Side, West Side. Her performance in the episode of the The Nurses titled “Express Stop from Lennox Avenue” earned her an Emmy nomination. In 1968 she joined the cast of Peyton Place, becoming the first African American actress to be featured on the show.

By this time Dee was firmly typecast as the “good wife,” some even calling her “the Negro June Allyson.” It is to Dee's credit that in these roles she so frequently moved beyond the stereotype, as in Edge of the City, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Incident (1967). She also worked to get roles which were more interesting. One example is her appearance as a prostitute playing a thief in the film version of Jean Genet's avant-garde play The Balcony (1963), which was acclaimed by the critics.

It was in the theater that Dee found many of her most challenging roles, however. In 1961 she was hailed for her performance as Lutiebelle in Davis's satiric play Purlie Victorious. In 1965, she became the first African American actress to receive featured roles with the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, when she played Kate in Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia in King Lear. One of her favorite and most challenging roles came in 1971 when she played Lena (a role initially intended for a white woman) in Athol Fugard's play Boesman and Lena. According to Clive Barnes of the New York Times, Dee gave “the finest performance I have ever seen …. her manner, her entire being have a quality of wholeness that is rarely encountered in the theater.” She won both the OBIE and the Drama Desk Award for her performance.

In 1968, Dee helped create an atypical role for herself when, with Jules Dassin and Julian Mayfield, she wrote and then starred (again as a prostitute) in Up Tight! Adapted from the Liam O'Flaherty novel The Informer, the film transports the action from Dublin to Cleveland and the Irish rebels of 1921 become black militants of 1968. Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote that Up Tight! is “such an intense and furious movie that it's impossible not to take it seriously.” Her next off-stage project came when she wrote and directed the musical Take It from the Top. First developed in 1975 under the title Twin-Bit Gardens and workshopped at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, it premiered at the New Federal Theater in 1979. In 1987 Dee published a volume of her stories, essays, and poems titled My One Good Nerve: Rhythms, Rhymes, Reasons.

In addition to her writing and directing, Dee continued to act in films and plays. Among her most noteworthy roles during the 1970s and 1980s were Ruth in the film Buck and the Preacher and Julia Augustine in Alice Childress's play Wedding Band (both in 1972). Dee won her second Drama Desk Award for her performance in the latter production. When the play was adapted into a television movie in 1974, she reprised her role. She also appeared in Roots: The Next Generation (1979); I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979); Cat People (1982); Long Day's Journey into Night (1983), for which she won an ACE Award; and the film version of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1984).

In 1988 Dee was inducted into Theatre Hall of Fame and published the children's book Two Ways To Count to Ten, a retelling of a Liberian folktale, which won the Literary Guild Award. The following year she impressed audiences in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and received the NAACP Image Award. In 1990, Dee developed Zora Is My Name for the PBS series American Playhouse and appeared in the television movie The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson. In 1991, she joined with Davis in another Spike Lee film, Jungle Fever; published another adaptation of a West African folktale, Tower to Heaven; won the Sony Master Innovator for Film Award; and, after seven previous nominations, won a long-overdue Emmy award for her performance in the television movie Decoration Day.

Recent Work

Throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century Dee continued to work at an incredible pace. She appeared on both television and in film in Cop and a Half (1993), The Stand (1994), Mr. And Mrs. Loving (1996), Captive Heart: The James Mink Story (1996), A Simple Wish (1997), The Wall (1998), Having Our Say (1999), Passing Glory (1999), Baby Geniuses (1999), Finding Buck McHenry (2000), A Storm in Summer (2000), Taking Back Our Town (2001), Feast of All Saints (2001), and Baby of the Family (2002). One of her most beautiful performances of this period is also one of the least well known. Dee was luminous in the 1995 short film by Diane Houston, A Tuesday Morning Ride, which was adapted from the Arna Bontemps story A Summer Tragedy. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1997.

Dee has also opened herself to more challenging roles by working outside of Hollywood and Broadway. In 1991 she worked with Rites & Reason and the Crossroads Theatre Company when she adapted and starred in Rosa Guy's award-winning novel, The Disappearance. The following year she appeared in Adrienne Kennedy's play, The Ohio State Murders, at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival. In 1994–1995 she again worked with Crossroads when she performed in Flyin' West, by Pearl Cleage, and Two Hah Hahs and a Homeboy with Ossie Davis and their son Guy. She played the lead in Saint Lucy's Eyes, directed by Billie Allen, a show that opened at the Women's Project Theatre in New York City and moved to the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2001. It was remounted, with Dee again in the lead role, by the Alliance Theatre Company of Atlanta in 2003.

The project that may be the closest to her heart is her one-woman show, My One Good Nerve: A Visit with Ruby Dee, which opened in 1998. (It was turned into a book and published by J. Wiley & Sons in 1999.) Of her work on that show Dee said:

"It's so satisfying for me to perform what I've written. The parts that reflect what I think and what I am don't come along often. And if we're going to upgrade our life quality, we have to think wider. TV cannot be the measure of our vision. Theatre is a haven for experimentation, the unthought-of equation—a place where we can bounce off walls. Profoundness and lightness need a place to grow. You know, critics expect you to be a certain way. They seem not to want to embrace you in any other ways. They don't believe in middle-class blacks—their expectations are narrow."

(Hamilton, p. 67)

Political Activism and Public Service

Throughout her career, Dee has been an activist as well as an artist. Both she and her husband were involved with the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because of their activism, they were branded “Racial Agitators and Communist-Fronters,” were called to testify before the committee, and were blacklisted.

This did not stop them from continuing to speak and act on their beliefs. Dee and Davis were close to both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. They were deeply involved in the civil rights movement and emceed the 1963 March on Washington. In response to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls, Dee and Davis helped found the Association of Artists for Freedom. In addition, they gave benefit performances and donated money to a wide variety of causes. Both have been repeatedly honored for their commitment to humanity and civil rights. They received the Frederick Douglass Award from New York Urban League in 1970, the Martin Luther King Jr. Award from Operation PUSH in 1972, and the Actors' Equity Association Paul Robeson Citation in 1975.

Beyond political action, Dee has worked for the community in other ways. She edited an anthology of young poets, many still in junior high school, titled Glowchild, and Other Poems (Third Press, New York, 1972). As part of her ongoing commitment to tell the African American story, she and Ossie Davis co-produced the radio show The Ruby Dee/Ossie Davis Story Hour in 1974. The show was presented on the over sixty stations of the National Black Network. In 1981, through their company Emmalyn Enterprises, she co-produced the series With Ossie and Ruby, this time for PBS. Other Emmalyn Enterprises productions have included “A Walk Through the Twentieth Century with Bill Moyers” and “Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum.” She has also created the Ruby Dee Scholarship in Dramatic Art, and with Davis founded the Institute of New Cinema Artists and the Recording Industry Training Program, which help to train young people for work in the television, film and music industries.

In 1994 Dee and Davis won the Silver Circle Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Science. The following year they were acknowledged as “national treasures” when they were honored with the Presidential Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. They received the award at the White House from their long-time admirers President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton.

In 2001 Dee and Davis received the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Lifetime Achievement Award. SAG president William Daniels said at the event: “For more than half a century, together and individually, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee have enriched and transformed American life as brilliant actors, writers, directors, producers and passionate advocates for social justice, human dignity and creative excellence.”

Ruby Dee is all that and more. She has long been a member of all the acting unions as well as of the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the Negro American Labor Council. Never giving up her commitment to activism, in 2001 both she and Davis were honored by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Angela Davis spoke at the event, saying, “They have been associated with literally every progressive movement for justice and peace for at least the last fifty years. Never have we had to worry that Ossie and Ruby would be frightened away from anything!”

In 1998, to commemorate their fiftieth anniversary, Dee and Davis published their best-selling autobiography, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. In typical Dee and Davis fashion, they celebrated their anniversary another way as well, by giving to others. Dee told the Christian Science Monitor,

"He didn't want to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. So I came up with the idea of doing a benefit for theaters like the New Federal and other off- and off-off Broadway theaters that have been struggling for years. And he bought it! My heart is always with those groups because I came from one, in a basement on 135th Street"

(Vellela, p. 20.)

The anniversary party raised $250,000 and the money was given to twelve theaters.

The couple has three children—Nora, Guy, and Laverne—and seven grandchildren. They have created and worked together throughout the years, so that today it can be difficult to think of Davis without Dee, or Dee without Davis. As President Clinton said of them: “Their vision and their talent shine as brightly today as they did on that first day when they met on Broadway so long ago, and our country is very much a better place because of their life and their work.”

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