Actor Ossie Davis Found Dead in Hotel
By Hillel Italie
Associated Press
Davis was found dead on Friday in his hotel room in Miami, where he was making a film called ''Retirement,'' according to Arminda Thomas, who works in his office in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Davis, who wrote, acted, directed and produced for the theater and Hollywood, was a central figure among black performers of the last five decades. He and Dee celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1998 with the publication of a dual autobiography, ''In This Life Together.''
Their partnership called to mind other performing couples, such as the Lunts, or Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Davis and Dee first appeared together in the plays ''Jeb,'' in 1946, and ''Anna Lucasta,'' in 1946-47. Davis' first film, ''No Way Out'' in 1950, was Dee's fifth. They shared billing in 11 stage productions and five movies during long parallel careers.
Both had key roles in the television series ''Roots: The Next Generation'' (1978), ''Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum'' (1986) and ''The Stand'' (1994). Davis appeared in three Spike Lee films, including ''School Daze,'' ''Do the Right Thing'' and ''Jungle Fever.'' Dee also appeared in the latter two; among her best-known films was ''A Raisin in the Sun,'' in 1961.
In 2004, he and Dee were among the artists selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors.
<>When not on stage or on camera, Davis and Dee were deeply involved in civil rights issues and efforts to promote the cause of blacks in the entertainment industry. They nearly ran afoul of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s, but were never openly accused of any wrongdoing.
Davis, the oldest of five children of a self-taught railroad builder and herb doctor in tiny Cogdell, Ga., grew up in nearby Waycross and Valdosta. He left home in 1935, hitchhiking to Washington to enter Howard University, where he studied drama, intending to be a playwright.
His career as an actor began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem, then the center of black culture in America. There, the young Davis met or mingled with some of the most influential figures of the time, including the preacher Father Divine, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
He also had what he described in the book as a ''flirtation with the Young Communist League,'' which he said essentially ended with the onset of World War II. Davis spent nearly four years in service, mainly as a surgical technician in an Army hospital in Liberia, serving both wounded troops and local inhabitants.
Back in New York in 1946, Davis debuted on Broadway in ''Jeb,'' a play about a returning soldier. His co-star was Ruby 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.
It marked the beginning of a collaboration on and off the stage.
In December 1948, on a day off from rehearsals from another play, ''The Smile of the World,'' Davis and Dee took a bus to New Jersey to get married. They already were so close that ''it felt almost like an appointment we finally got around to keeping,'' Dee writes in ''In This Life Together.''
As black performers, they found themselves caught up in the social unrest fomented by the then-new Cold War and the growing debate over social and racial justice in the United States.
''We young ones in the theater, trying to fathom even as we followed, were pulled this way and that by the swirling currents of these new dimensions of the Struggle,'' Davis wrote in the joint autobiography. ''Black revolutionaries fighting, just like the Russians, to liberate the workers and save the world, against the black bourgeoisie fighting, at the behest of rich white folks, to defeat the Communist menace and save the world.''
Davis says he ''had no trouble identifying which side I was on.'' He lined up with black socialist reformer DuBois and singer Paul Robeson, remaining fiercely loyal to the singer even after Robeson was denounced by other black political, sports and show business figures for his openly communist and pro-Soviet sympathies.
While Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, the New York theater world became engulfed in McCarthyism and red-baiting controversies, Davis and Dee -despite their leftist activism in causes ranging from labor rallies to saving the accused atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - emerged from the anti-communist fervor unscathed and, in Davis' view, justifiably so.
''We've never been, to our knowledge, guilty of anything - other than being black - that might upset anybody,'' he wrote.
Mrs. Davis, I must tell you.I look for strong marriages. In this day, and try as hard as I can not to make a mockery of the institution God made! In my case, though both of us are educated, however, my husband chose crack-coaine after years of being togrther!
On the 4th of july, it will be 38 years of ups and downs. I now am tired! I've tried everythingg! You two, have allowed me to at least understand, it IS possible! When you sleep at night know you gave, some little Chemical Therapist/Social Worker in Dayton,Ohio strength to keep trying! It's made me weary, noe though. God bless and wrap his arms and keep you strong now!
Love, Claudine.
Ossie will still cover you, dear!
Posted by: Mrs. Claudine Richardson | Saturday, February 19, 2005 at 12:04 AM