From the
www.sun-sentinel.com:
Actor, producer, playwright, director and activist Ossie Davis, who delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X, was found dead in his Miami Beach hotel room Friday morning. He was 87.
Mr. Davis was in Miami making a film called Retirement, on which he had begun work Monday, according to his agent Michael Livingston.
Miami Beach police spokesman Bobby Hernandez said Mr. Davis' grandson called police shortly before 7 a.m. because his grandfather did not respond to knocks on his Shore Club Hotel room, a place where Mr. Davis would not have been allowed to stay in the early 1960s.
Along with his wife, Ruby Dee, Mr. Davis distinguished himself on the stage and screen and in real life as a civil rights activist. They often took roles that dealt with racial injustice.
They were considered a regal couple. In December, at the 27th annual Kennedy Center Honors, Mr. Davis and Dee were saluted for their lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts and their political activism.
"He was an activist when he didn't have to be," said historian Marvin Dunn of Florida International University.
Mr. Davis and Dee made quite an impression on local residents when they spoke at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Lauderhill in 2001, City Commissioner Margaret Bates said Friday.
"America has lost not only a great actor but a great activist and human being," said Bates, chairwoman of the city's Martin Luther King task force.
"I do know the people really enjoyed him and Ruby. They kind of bounce off each other. When Ruby would leave off, Ossie would take over. When Ossie would leave off, Ruby would take over. Half of a great team has been lost."
In the late 1980s, Mr. Davis spent time in Palm Beach County filming the TV series B.L. Stryker with actor Burt Reynolds, who grew up in the area. The detective show aired in 1989 and 1990.
During a day off from shooting in 1989, Mr. Davis talked to Palm Beach Community College students about his screen experiences and shot a short public-service film on the campus, according to then-PBCC President Edward M. Eissey.
In addition to B.L. Stryker, Mr. Davis worked with Reynolds in the 1990-94 ensemble television comedy Evening Shade and a 1969 feature film, Sam Whiskey.
But it was Mr. Davis' play Purlie Victorious, which opened on Broadway in 1961, that garnered him broad-based attention.
The satire about sharecroppers in the Deep South trying to start a church was based on a true childhood encounter with Georgia police.
"I had been picked up on my way home from school by the police in Waycross, and taken into the station house where they laughingly poured syrup on my head, while I was laughing, too. After all these years, the incident still rankled," he wrote in his and his wife's joint autobiography This Life Together.
The play was adapted into the hit musical, Purlie.
When not on stage or on camera, Mr. Davis and Dee were deeply involved in civil rights issues.
He lined up with black socialist reformer W.E.B. DuBois and remained fiercely loyal to singer Paul Robeson even when other celebrities denounced Robeson for his openly Communist and pro-Soviet sympathies.
Mr. Davis, the oldest of five children of a self-taught railroad builder and herb doctor, was born in tiny Cogdell, Ga., in 1917 and grew up in nearby Waycross and Valdosta. He left home in 1935 and hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to enter Howard University, where he studied drama. He intended to be a playwright.
His career as a stage actor began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem, then the center of black culture in America. There, the young Mr. Davis met or mingled with some of the most influential African-American figures of the time, including the preacher Father Divine, DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
Mr. Davis spent nearly four years in the military, mainly as a surgical technician in an Army hospital in Liberia, where he treated wounded troops and local residents. He returned to New York in 1945.
He debuted the next year on Broadway in Jeb, a play about a returning soldier. His co-star was Dee, whose budding stage career had paralleled his own. They had even appeared in different productions of the same play, On Strivers Row, in 1940. In December 1948, on a day off from rehearsals from another play, The Smile of the World, Mr. Davis and Dee took a bus to New Jersey to get married.
Along with film, stage and television, the couple's careers extended to a radio show, The Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour, which ran on 65 stations for four years in the mid-1970s.
Both wrote plays and screenplays, and Mr. Davis directed several films, most notably Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970.
Throughout his career, Mr. Davis and his wife remained dignified advocates for blacks in the entertainment industry.
In 1999, when black actors didn't win any Oscars at the Academy Awards, some suggested there were too few minority members of the Academy. Mr. Davis addressed the issue at the NAACP Image Awards.
"I don't worry about that," he said. "I've been doing this a long time, and I am happy to see what we've created. We have learned to respect our own images, and we've helped the industry appreciate who we are."
Staff Writers Susannah Bryan, Ginelle G. Torres, Jennifer Peltz and Scott Travis contributed to this report, along with material from the Associated Press.
Gregory Lewis can be reached at glewis@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4203.
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1 Comments:
hmmm don't worry about hanging your head lots of folks haven't seen Hotel Rwanda. I finally went to see it last night instead of watching the Oscars.
10:56 PM
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