Legendary Ossie Davis Dies at 87Actor, writer, director, activist
Ossie Davis, the award-winning actor, playwright, director and unwavering social activist has died at age 87. Davis was found dead in a hotel room in Miami Beach, where he was shooting the film Retirement, along with Jack Warden, Peter Falk and Rip Torn.
Davis, who often collaborated with actress Ruby Dee, his wife of 57 years, appeared in more than 80 films and television projects, as well as numerous stage productions, including several Broadway plays. He and Dee, with whom he jointly received Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, published the 1998 memoir With Ossie & Ruby: In This Life Together on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. They met in 1946, when they appeared together in the Broadway plays Jeb and Anna Lucasta, and married in 1948 on a day off from rehearsing their next play.
The couple both had pivotal roles in the TV series Roots: The Next Generation, Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum and The Stand. From 1963-65, Davis was a cast member of the dramatic series The Defenders; in 1980 Davis and Dee had their own series, Ossie and Ruby!; and in the 1990s he was a regular cast member of the sitcom Evening Shade. More recently, Davis, whose resonant baritone was also heard in television commercial and public service announcements (his was the voice heard intoning “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” in advertisements for the United Negro College Fund), guest-starred on the Showtime series The L Word, as the judgmental father of a lesbian daughter. Davis was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, and won a Daytime Emmy as Outstanding Performer in a Children’s Special for the 2000 production Finding Buck McHenry.
Davis made his feature film debut in the 1950 production No Way Out, starring Sidney Poitier. His memorable early films include Gone Are the Days!, based on his play Purlie Victorious, The Cardinal, directed by Otto Preminger, and The Hill, directed by Sidney Lumet. More recent films include I’m Not Rappaport and The Client. Beginning in the late 1980s, he became a fixture in the films of director Spike Lee, for whom he appeared in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Get on the Bus and She Hate Me. Davis also directed his own films, most notably Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970.
Davis was also a decorated writer. His 1961 play Purlie Victorious, a satire of racial stereotypes, was produced on Broadway with Davis in the title role. In 1970, he co-wrote the book for Purlie, the musical based on the play. In 1984 Davis won a Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Drama Anthology for For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story.
Just as formidable as his professional achievements were Davis’ efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement and other social causes. In 1963, he joined the celebrated March on Washington, and in 1965 he delivered a stirring eulogy for his slain friend, Malcolm X; nearly 30 years later, he repeated his eulogy as a voice-over in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. In 1968 he delivered another eulogy at the funeral of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and in 1999, after African immigrant Amadou Diallo was killed by police outside his Bronx apartment, Davis joined the street protests that led to the officers’ arrest.
Born in 1917 in the small town of Cogdell, Georgia, Davis grew up in nearby Waycross and Valdosta. In 1935 he hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to enroll at Howard University, where he studied drama and began writing plays. He launched his acting career four years later in New York City, with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem. He then spent four years in the Army during World War II, during which he worked as a surgical technician in Liberia. Upon discharge from the service he returned to New York and made his Broadway debut in Jeb.
In addition to Dee, who was in New Zealand making a film when Davis passed away, he is survived by three children, Nora, Hasna and Guy, and seven grandchildren.
The Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television conducted a two-and-a-half hour interview with Ossie Davis on October 26, 1999. The entire interview can be screened at the Archive’s offices in North Hollywood, California. For more information, call (818) 509-2260.
Excerpts from Ossie Davis’ Archive of American Television interview:
On television in the next century:
"I see technology changing things so that we won’t recognize them in ten or fifteen years. I don’t know what television will be at that time. It will still be the projection of stories through images, hopefully to make an impact on the audience. What will happen will be determined a great deal by the advertising industry. And the advertising industry doesn’t always, out of its own needs, serve the basic needs of our humanity. So I don’t know where television is going, and I don’t know if there will come a point when I’ll say, 'Well, television, you go your way and I go mine.' To me, my fallback position is always the stage, and always an audience and always a chance to come out and say something and do something. Ruby and I do it now in churches and schools and in colleges. We spend a lot of time in just basic communication, no camera, no nothing. Us and the audience, and we perform. So, I should hope television, as it grows, will also deepen. That it will express a concern for all the elements of our life. You and I sit here today, and you look around and you’re impressed by what I have, and I am, too. I’m also aware that before this day is over, 40,000 children in this world will have died of hunger and neglect. The AIDS crisis as it blooms in Africa, the new diseases, which we’re beginning to transport across the oceans and things like that, and our incapacity to solve the problems of police brutality and crime. The fact that there are more young black males in prisons than there are in colleges…. All of these are going to have a social impact. Television is one of those voices that could help us resolve those problems. But it may be too busy sending us goods and services to do the deeper things that are required. I pray that that’s not the case. I have great hopes for television, but I sleep with one eye open."
His advice to aspiring writers:
"The only good advice is a good example. The rest becomes talk, and sometimes bombast. In talking to young playwrights, or old playwrights, aspiring playwrights, black and white, men and women, I say to them that art has a deep responsibility—social, cultural, and otherwise. And that the basic motivation for the creation of art is, in a sense, to meet those responsibilities. Now, it doesn’t mean that you cannot express yourself in any way you want to, but it takes place in a social context, whether you mean it to do so or not. That being the case, let us, through our effort, deliberately try and make things better rather than make things worse. And it will be up to us to define what we mean by better. Ossie has no right or authority to tell you, young playwright, what is good, what is bad. I can tell you what my preferences are. I can tell you how I would treat it, but I inspire you, I beg you, to keep your humanity in the forefront of all that you do. There are a lot of people watching and being affected by everything you say and do. So beware, be careful."
On how opportunities for African-Americans in television have changed since he began his career:
"We’ve come from a time when there were no opportunities at all for blacks in television, in front of the camera or behind it. Until now, we see in many places opportunities for blacks to express themselves, or to be included in the American mix, which is as it should be. There is still, I think, behind the cameras, where decisions in policy and all those things happen, a dearth of representation of blacks and minorities and women. We’ve got to do something about that. There are still, in some aspects of what television has as its staple, not a sound representation of what America is about, and there’s a lot of talk nowadays about the gradual disappearance of blacks from certain types of television shows. And that is true. My hope is that that will be corrected. I think it will be corrected by the fact that we blacks and our buying habits—we have $500 hundred billion a year in our pocket, and television and all these people are out trying to get that money. I don’t think they’re going too far away. We’ll have to remind them that we’re there. But I think once there are reminders, they’ll come around and respond. I hope so."
On how he would like to be remembered:"I would like to be remembered as a man who had love in his life—the love of a woman, the love of a family, the love of friends, the respect of a profession. A man who tried to do the best that he could, but at the last moment was willing, although reluctantly, to get off the stage and make room for somebody else."